FriendOfDeSoto

I found Heliboard with the added files for swiping action just as good or bad as Gboard.

It turned out to be a Twitter clone from ten years ago and I realized I didn’t need that any more. If I didn’t need to reach some people who cannot overcome the hurdle the fediverse proper puts up before being enjoyable, I would not be using it today. But media popularity post-Elon-Twitter and relative ease of setup have given the platform relative heft. But it’s not open and not really federated so it’s masquerading and we don’t really want you know whose money is paying the bills behind the scenes either. If anything, the fediverse can learn from Bluesky a thing or two about onboarding people who cannot be asked to invest the time to make Mastodon enjoyable. It will take time, much more time, to get people, especially non-techy ones, to the new normal of being your own algorithm. I see Bluesky as a stepping stone in that direction that will survive in its own niche.

First thing, disable all auto backup on your phone. This is step 1 for anything.

If you have access to a computer, log in to Photos through a browser and delete images there and it won’t affect your phone’s storage. Maybe test it with an image if lesser importance before you bulk delete.

You could also move your locally stored photos to a different, temporary folder. Then delete the backed up ones in Photos. Then move the local files back.

I wouldn’t rely on the Google Takeout images. If the standard settings applied, the images will all be in Google’s compressed format. Granted, most people in the world couldn’t tell the difference. But it might be better to keep the best quality for the future.

Wow. It’s like they have discovered the concept of biases. A coffee table book of umbrella pictures would’ve had a similar effect no doubt.

For their next study they will surely test dihydrogenoxide in its liquid aggregate state for wetness.

This pretty much applies to all search engines. Because of that I don’t see the point of it being posted in this lemmy.

Security is one thing. I was more thinking about the pain of having to move everything again when the single provider goes bankrupt or becomes politically intolerable or gets swallowed by the kraken.

The solution should not be one single provider. Use Ente for pictures, maybe Proton* for other cloud storage and Docs replacement, look into a Nextcloud server hosted by another provider for calendar and email. Don’t put all your digital eggs in one walled nest.

*Proton is plagued by a CEO who can’t keep his mouth shut about politics. Look into that and how you feel about it before you sign up. Their VPN is good but I wouldn’t use them also for email to make switching less of a headache - and I don’t think you could use your own domain there anyway.

Proton has a good calendar service but if you want to change color labels you need to be on the more expensive tier - and they don’t really tell you that ahead of time. Which p’ed me off so much I moved my calendar to a Nextcloud server instead, which works great. It also got me off Keep, Drive, and I’m working on Gmail.

My review came with an asterisk. I mainly wanted to point out how to get it free so you can make up your own mind.

I don’t remember if I bought it on Google Play so I don’t know if you would need to. You can though test drive it guaranteed for free if you sideload the F-Droid app store and get it from there.

I stopped using it about two years ago because it felt it took forever loading feeds and switched to Tusky, which has less functionality (e.g. no post scheduling) but loads faster, I think, and works well for my limited needs. Fedilab’s menus never put me off. But I never went back.

So that’s a review that needs a pinch of salt or two.