In addition, pirated physical media used to be an easy way for non techy people to acquire media in developing countries.

5 years already? Shit, I'm old.

The incredible thing about these articles is that they don't make the slight mention of lemmy.

That one linked is a well written summary of what happened, but it's partial if they don't include the migration that happened, even if it wasn't that big.

I understand your bad experience with GSIs, but I think it's a step in the right direction. The way custom roms have been made through the years isn't sustainable for the long run. It's too much work for the few people involved, that goes obsolete so fast. But with GSis, the projects will one day be able to maintain just a few images, and the porting community will just have to focus on unlocking the devices.

GSIs aren't working 100% today, but it's something still new in the perspective of manufacturers, and the tendency is to have better support with time.

Just to put things into perspective, my experience, as someone poor from a third word country, is just the opposite. In the past, only the more expensive phones had custom rom support, and the cheaper ones I got access to, wouldn't even get results if I searched for the model on xda. Nowadays, even cheap chinese phones or the ones locally manufactured in here allow me to put a GSI and have a customized experience, up to date with security patches.

I have been looking at this possibility, but running a bridge means that I will need to self host a service, which adds one more point of failure, while not really removing whatsapp from my life, so I'm not convinced it's a good alternative.

Whatsapp

And no, I can't simply stop using or ask friends to move to an alternative. I'm from Brazil and that thing is so popular and mainstream, that even stores or public services use it.

Just this week, I had to report an animal abuse case to the authorities, and the official communication channel I had to use was through whatsapp.

It's sad to see how dependent of a single proprietary service for something so important we allowed ourselves to become...

Well... I'm using pidgin right now.

Let's invert the question: what makes it worth the switch? If I'm going to change something, you have to prove why it's worth, not me proving why I shouldn't.

By seeying most reactions ro your post, I can only think that most lemmy users don't care about privacy at all. Or, at least, didn't fully understand the implications.

When I started using the internet, it was a shock, because I got in contact with people from different places and realized how poor I am :(

Even today, I get cultural shocks here and there. Just this week, someone mentioned what they consider the bare minimum specs for a phone they consider to be viable for simple usage, and guess what? My phone doesn't have half of these specs.

There's something that worries me about GPT-like technologies, and I see very few people talking about it: GPT-based social media bots.

It can give people and groups to create much advanced mass manipulation strategies. Imagine a lot of gpt accounts on all sites creating comments advocating pro or against something, every time it's mentioned, in a very natural language, that can fool most people.

It worries me a lot, and I'm sure it will be done at some point. If recent elections around the world were a mess due to a lot of social media manipulation and fake news campaigns, now imagine that powered by gpt.

I remember when they took it off. They probably brought it back because it was giving them a bad image.