Everyone is suggesting Immich, which is the answer if you want to self-host. But you say you are not very tech savvy, so you might want a service you don't need to self-host, and in that case take a look at Ente Photos.
You get end to end encrypted photos and don't need to do anything. They have guides on how to move your photos from Google Photos as well.
Ente can also be self-hosted, so you can compare what you like more.
I'm not religious, but sometimes I wish Christianity was real because it would be so funny for these "Christians" to be judged by their god.
On your first experience that sounds like an extreme reaction by any chance do you remember what you said specifically?
It was many years ago now, but your explanation of the firewall makes much sense to me. Not sure why wouldn't they just said something similar.
Also it's CPC not CCP. CCP is the acronym pushed by the US
I knew both acronyms are in use, but good to know CPC is preferred, I will keep that in mind.
On your closing paragraph I think 3 anecdotes really doesn't give a good view of a society of 1.4 billion people
I completely agree, but I assume any media is biased, so it's hard to know what to trust without ultimately only relying on personal experiences, even if these are obviously not representative.
Thank you for the response, I appreciate the time.
I didn't join Lemmy for politics so I usually read these discussions from the sidelines, but there are some points that maybe you guys can help me with.
As someone against US's imperialism and capitalism, I seem to be a prime candidate to support the Chinese worldviews, but it's really difficult for me to get past my concerns. First of all I always see these rebuttals to criticism about China that compare it to the US or say that "westerners" are in no position to criticise. Which from my Eastern European point of view is just annoying because I'm far more critical of these anyway and the whataboutism doesn't actually address anything.
I had 3 "personal experiences" with Chinese people. One back when I was at university and was studying with a Chinese exchange student. We were talking about university stuff for days being all buddies, when I was helping him with some app not working on his phone, which turned out to be due to the lack of Google services. Being relevant to the topic, I asked about the Chinese firewall. I expected anything between "It's not a problem, we use Chinese services anyway", or "It's not a problem, it's easy to work around", or "I think it's good, it protects against X and Y" or even "I prefer not to talk about it". But instead he looked at me as if I just insulted his grandma, left, and never interacted with me again.
A few years later I was talking with a Chinese acquietance at a bar, there were some local political news on the TV and he cracked a joke about the politician shown, I joked back about the CCP. He looked insulted and stopped talking to me. Come on you started and it's all in good heart... Maybe these 2 people were just weirdos and not representative, but that's my experience.
Then there was a Chinese person making science videos online, posted on BiliBili and YouTube that I watched for a long time. One time they made a different video about how they are disillusioned about life in China and it was critical of some aspects of Chinese politics. After years of making content, it was their last video and all their social media were deleted shortly after. I'm not saying it's government intervention, maybe they did want to just randomly stop making content without saying a word, everything is possible.
But all these experiences tell me Chinese society is not accepting of even apparent criticism, which does not look like a free society to me. Someone else under this post says all criticism, even if constructive and in good faith, serves western propaganda interests. Which... Sure I don't disagree, but how can anyone buy in to an idea if they are not allowed to question it? I personally never got into these communities because I know I'm more likely to be accused of being US-paid bot or whatever than to get a good faith answer to my questions.
I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess I'm just telling you lot that you could be more approachable because I think you are pushing back on would-be allies.
I watched it live, they did respond to his direct questions, but at some point Trump went into a monologue that didn't end in a question, and they didn't say anything back, keeping a silence going for an awkward amount of time until Houston asked if they are still on the line and they confirmed that yeah they heard everything. And said nothing else.
"because that's the only way to use it without being harassed online"
I disagree with his reasons for removing it, but they are pretty clear.
Why do you say it's an amazing project? Looks to me like someone copied vim, and according to the commits did nothing useful other than changing some text in a few files. The author's comments are all about coming up with a cool name for it, and what "cool" new features to add. I don't see any plan on actually making this a viable competing project. I don't see the author having much credentials in leading a project of this caliber either.
Before anyone misunderstands my comment, yes anyone not liking AI should stop using vim, I very much agree. And there are two viable ways forward:
This project is not one of them.
Where is the author's plan to tackle the 1600 issues that vim has open? How do they address the fact that vim has hundreds of commits each month, and literally had 68 contributors in just the last month? In the past month they closed 66 issues with vim. Half of vim's codebase is written in vimscript, and the other half in C. The new lead maintainer, I quote: "thankfully i know some C, but not vimscript". They know some C and no vimscript? So how do they plan to develop this project?!
Another quote: "removing old targets, stripping away graphical stuff (who uses this in graphical mode anyways? everyone uses it in the CLI...", and they already plan to drop Windows support. Already ignoring user's needs and removing functionality. Now, they are perfectly entitled to do whatever in their fork. But how is it a viable competitor to vim in any way?
Even assuming the worst case scenario on what damage AI can do to the progress of vim's development, who can seriously suggest that 1 person who doesn't even know the relevant programming langagues can make a better project than hundreds of experienced contributors that are doing it for years, AI or not?
And again, all the power to them, they can have some fun with their fork. But it's ridicoulus to suggest it as an alternative. Two years from now, vim will have fixed ~1500 issues at the current rate. And will have a bunch of new ones due to AI. Meanwhile this project will be dead, and the latest version will have 1500 unfixed issues that are all fixed in vim.
Taking a stance again AI in vim? Do it, campaign for it, talk to the maintainers, effect change, review PRs and comment about the AI mistakes you see, submit bug reports for bugs caused by AI and make a case for forbidding it's use. You have my full support. This fork? It's obviously going nowhere, it's a waste of effort that could be used to actually stop AI.
Yeah, it is. It's such an extraordinary claim.
One requiring extraordinary evidence that wasn't provided.
"It's doing amazing hacks to access everything and it's so good at it it's undetectable!" Right, how convenient.
I'm sure Temu collects all information you put into the app and your behaviour in it, but this guy is making some very bold claims about things that just aren't possible unless Temu is packing some serious 0-days.
For example he says the app is collecting your fingerprint data. How would that even happen? Apps don't have access to fingerprint data, because the operating system just reports to the app "a valid fingerprint was scanned" or "an unknown fingerprint was scanned", and the actual fingerprint never goes anywhere. Is Temu doing an undetected root/jailbreak, then installing custom drivers for the fingerprint sensor to change how it works?
And this is just one claim. It's just full of bullshit. To do everything listed there it would have to do multiple major exploits that are on state-actor level and wouldn't be wasted on such trivial purpose. Because now that's it's "revealed", Google and Apple would patch them immediately.
But there is nothing to patch, because most of the claims here are just bullshit, with no technical proof whatsoever.
It lets you have analytics in your game (how many players do X, use y feature), without the backlash of analytics.
The confusion stems from the fact there no APIs in Android that let apps use RCS. Only Google can use it on Android and no other apps can use it. Anyone can make an SMS app. Only Google can make an RCS app.
It is an open standard, meaning you are free to create your own operating system for phones that implements RCS. But Google doesn't let you use it on Android, so in practice it's closed.
Plus, Google's implementation of RCS adds extra features (like encryption) that aren't part of the standard. So even if you create your own operating system that implements RCS, it will still be incompatible. So that's another reason it's not really open.
Are there actually apps that refuse to work if you don't give them notification permission? I don't think I ran into one