A few days ago I noticed a marketing email sent to my Zima alias. Apparently lots of other people also noticed this and were not happy. Attached is the IceWhale response.

Android has a greatly overhauled desktop mode on the way to replace the current primitive proof of concept in developer options. 6th gen Pixels added hardware-based virtualization support and 8th gen Pixels added USB-C DisplayPort alternate mode. It will all come together soon.

Overhauled desktop mode is already partially shipped as a disabled-by-default feature. Android enables some of it for the Pixel Tablet already but not Pixel phones. We plan to enable the same feature flags for phones too. Either way, it's an experimental developer option for now.

Playtron has made some waves in Linux gaming. They have lots of big names in Linux working on the project. Recently they were featured by Framework today in their presentation. However, I think it's abundantly clear that anyone who cares about FOSS should stay far away from this.

I was intrigued by this as well some months ago. I even ignored when they blatantly lied about Valve/Steam locking down their OS to only play Steam games. So I gave it a try and installed it. On setup they wanted me to agree to a EULA. That was red flag #2. Never seen that before. Then they wanted me to agree to their privacy policy. It is a very typical corporate user-hostile privacy policy. Some highlights

• Like many website operators, we collect information that your browser sends whenever you visit our Website. This includes Log Data, such as your computer’s IP address, browser type, browser version, the pages of our Website that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages and other statistics, and whether you reached our page via a social media or email campaign. This information may be collected via several technologies, including cookies, web beacons, clear GIFs, canvas fingerprinting and other means, such as Google Remarketing and Facebook Pixel.
• If you access our Sites through third parties (e.g., Facebook or Google), or if you share content from our Sites to a third-party social media service, the third-party service will send us certain information about you if the third-party service and your account settings allow such sharing.
• "Professional, employment, or education information, such as your industry and job level, for news personalization, or copies of your resume or CV and any other information required to verify your qualifications, for recruitment purposes"
• "Commercial information, such as a record of purchased products or subscriptionsInferences about your consumer preferences or characteristics."

How we use personal information:

• To market our products and/or services to you
• With respect to website cookies, to share with third-party marketing partners to provide tailored advertising on our Website and other websites that you may visit

We share your information with our third-party service providers and any subcontractors as required to offer you our products and services. The service providers we use help us to:

• run email and mobile messaging campaigns;
• perform marketing analytics;
• provide measurement services and target ads (you can opt out of these services at websites such as http://www.aboutads.info/choices and http://www.youronlinechoices.eu/)

They even admit to not respecting "Do Not Track" signals.

Sorry for the terrible photo, I can only upload 1 so I had to mash all these screenshots together somehow.

If you're not familiar with GrayJay, it's a cross-platform video app. You can watch and search videos from YouTube (YMMV if you use a VPN), Odyssey, Bitchute, Nebula, Kick, Twitch, pretty much anything you can imagine, and aggregates all your subscriptions and searches into 1 cross-platform feed. And if it's not on there you can create your own plugin. There's a repository here.

PeerTube has been supported since day 1 but previously you could only view videos from the instance you added, so you had to add them all individually. It was updated recently and seems to not be tied to any instances at all. You can view comments but it doesn't seem to support login right now so you won't be able to "like" or leave comments. I've asked them to add this functionality.

For PeerTube you'll probably have to go into the sources and enable it. You'll probably also want to enable SepiaSearch at the bottom (this searches across instances, for those who have opted into search).

I don't really know how to explain the monetization model. There's a $10 lifetime license fee. They're adamant that it's not free (as in beer) but if you don't pay for the license, nothing happens 🤷‍♂️ I paid for it because it's awesome.

You can download from F-Droid (using FUTO repository) or direct from grayjay.app (the app updates itself).

There's also a desktop version, and your license works for both. Although the desktop version is really nice, it's not yet as polished as the mobile one. It also supports syncing your data over your local network.

Source code here

Enjoy!

I started a podcast recently and learned a lot about the industry in the process and thought I'd share.

1. The term "podcast" has been bastardized to the point that it is a completely meaningless word. It's no longer audio-only and no longer requires syndication of any kind. At best, it could probably be loosely-defined as long-form interview/conversational media.

2. Video is a big component of podcasting now. YouTube has become the most popular "podcasting" platform, even though they don't even actually support "podcasts" at all (more below). Video podcasts can actually be distributed properly via RSS. This has the potential to muddy what a "podcast" actually is even further. I've already noticed several straight up TV shows being syndicated as "podcasts". This is problematic because a user is typically looking for a "podcast" that they can count on consuming without any visual elements. I suppose it's possible for any particular client to filter out video podcasts, but I don't see that option in any of the apps I've tested.

3. Spotify is trying to kill podcasts as an open platform

• they do not allow you to add podcasts by URL/RSS in the app. So if a publisher you want to listen do does not have a Spotify account, you cannot listen to them.
• You can syndicate your podcast into Spotify, but it will not support video. It also does not support video syndication out of Spotify. So if you want a video on Spotify, you'd better upload it directly.
• they pay popular podcasters hundreds of millions of dollars to not make their content available elsewhere. This makes things worse for everyone in a blatant attempt at dominating the podcast industry the same way they have the music industry. Fortunately it does seem like it was unsuccessful at this point but I've canceled and deleted my account/app regardless.
• Even if you have a paid premium Spotify account, you're still served ads from Spotify if the creator chooses to add them. They do not offer any option to pay extra and opt out of these ads.
• I'm afraid, given enough market share, that they will start adding ads to all podcasts, regardless of if the uploader wants them or not.
• Im also afraid with sufficient market share, they will stop supporting syndication altogether for shows hosted on their platform. I can't imagine any other reason they still allow you to host your podcasts on their platform for free.
• Despite all of this, they have been successful at becoming the second most popular platform for podcasts.
• Spotify does not allow you to update the RSS link (anymore?). The only way to update it is to delete your account, which deletes the podcast, then make a new account.

4. YouTube is not great either

• A "podcast" on YouTube is, technically-speaking, nothing more than a video playlist that receives a special tag so it can be categorized in the YT "music" app (because apparently you can't have a music app without podcasts now).
• They killed their podcast app to fold the functionality into YT music, which is, just dumb, and really awful to use. Podcast-exclusive apps are typically already difficult enough to use.
• You can import a podcast via RSS, but you cannot syndicate via rss.

5. Because of these syndication failures, I find myself laboriously uploading the same content to several different platforms (self hosted, Spotify and YouTube), which kinda defeats the purpose of podcasts, not to mention being unnecessarily wasteful of resources.

6. Apple is, shockingly, the most open popular podcasting client, and yet a distant third in popularity. Probably because you can't even get the app outside of Apple devices (which is fair, considering I don't expect them to create apps for competing devices that don't benefit them in any way).

• They don't even support hosting
• They seem to be the only popular platform that supports syndication of video podcasts.

7. Peertube would be an excellent hosting platform, except that they don't support RSS standards properly. If your client supports it, you can import them in the app and they will work great but if you want to add them directly to popular platforms like Spotify, or especially Apple podcasts (which, as mentioned above, supports video syndication) they will be rejected due to this missing information.

8. Castopod is a pretty great platform, supports ActivityPub federation, is fully-featured, easy to use, and can be self-hosted (and I do). Unfortunately it does not support video.

Please correct me if I'm wrong about any of the above.

Stood up my PixelFed server yesterday. Federation seems to just...not be happening. I manually added a bunch of servers in the "instances" tab but they all say 0 users. If I search for exact profile names, I can find them but they're completely empty. Pictured is my server on the left and .social on the right. The weird part is that a handful of posts do come through. Like, maybe a dozen in the last 24 hours in my global feed.

I made a test post and someone on .social followed me, so they can obviously see me, but when I went to follow them back, their profile was also completely empty.

Is there something I need to do to "kickstart" this into gear? Do I need to just continue waiting? It's been ~16 hours at this point.

I almost never look at the app store but I popped in today in the wake of the TikTok ban and was shocked to see this.