Mobile developer here. Somewhat. I’ve written mobile apps for my internship and I have some several hundred hours of experience.

This is because Apple provides a much better SDK and, most importantly, the fact that all the iOS devices actually get updated means you are not stuck needing to support ancient SDK versions and you can freely rely on newer methods more easily

Though my personal phone is Android. I see the difference in polish between most iOS and most Android apps, but I think that’s an objective difference but a subjective trait. For now I still prefer Android: while everything is still a little more rough around the edges the gap has been slowly closing for s few years now, Material You is finally really good, and gone are the days of the fiddly Android phones that never worked quite right or needed the occasional trip to recovery mode to wipe /cache to stay fast or the occasional factory reset: modern Android is much different, it’s basically fully immutable in a way where every action is completely reversible, and it does a much better job at maintaining itself than it used to in the past.

Still yes, for people who value the slightly higher polish on native iOS apps, being able to sideload as well is big. It would make me at least consider the iPhone. A lot of the apps I use every day come from F-Droid, and F-Droid is where I look for my apps first when I need something to fulfill a certain purpose. I’m pretty big on FOSS, but I’ve never been able to truly commit on my phone yet as it’s not really ready for my use case yet (mostly, weird bugs and missing features in MicroG). So it’s not FOSS Vs Apple - it’s Google vs Apple in my case, so neither is an ethical choice.

First things first, throwing people away and online dating are in two different camps entirely. For the throwing people away it’s something that I have seen a lot: the Reddit dating advice is also more and more common and spread on social media, and it’s becoming to be eaten up by people. Ask random friends in your social circle in general, and you’ll find that - at least the younger ones - are susceptible to this trend.

As for online dating: we can meet in the middle and say that I think it would be a net pro on something that is structured differently than Tinder, which represents the embodiment of what I think is bad about it. There is, of course, value in being able to have access to a wider pool than “your friend group and social circle”. This is how I would structure my own dating app:

• Free and open source with no invasive data telemetry, full GDPR compliance, you can request all your data to be wiped clean with a button.
• No freemium model to encourage buying a pro option for it to actually work. Using a simple, unbiased algorithm that does a sort by distance, then a sort by sexual/romantic orientation compatibility (without requiring you to state it on your profile, for privacy reasons)
• Use a model that discourages “serial dating”. Every match you have with the app has a countdown, and the chat automatically terminates after some amount of messages and days. Every match has a “Set as Exclusive” button. Both parties press it when they’re not quite in a relationship, but are seeing each other exclusively. When both people press it, both people know they have agreed on this, and from then on the app goes in total lockdown until you deselect it and go back to non-exclusive dating.
• As for the last thing, I will freely borrow an idea that already exists from the Hinge app (which I consider to be the absolutely least worst option around; I have read a book written by one of the people who worked on it and I have agreed with every word): The app is made to be deleted. When two people enter an official relationship, both select a “Make official” button in their match’s settings view. When that’s done, the app congratulates you, deletes both accounts and then invites you to delete it.

Yes, I am aware this would not work for open relationships or stuff like couples looking for a third unicorn for kinky stuff, but that’s by design, as existing apps already work well for that. Tinder, for example, is more widely used for casual sex that it is about building romantic relationships, and it is perfectly adequate for that.

Yes, you are pointing to combines marriages - but I am not suggesting we go back to the 50’s, I am talking about the past few years. Capitalism has already been an upgrade over feudalism, I agree. My point is that, lately, we have been overdoing it and everything that started off as a positive innovation, like social media and dating apps, is starting to lose its soul and become more Draconian or anti - capitalism.

Greed is what a lot of this is, and yes capitalism is all wrapped up in that but I don’t think if you somehow took it away that every problem goes away.

I have a question for you: why is it that billionaires and big capitalists have been amassing more profits and pushing this more intensive version of capitalism? I know this argumentation all too well, I have once had a long discussion with a friend who argued capitalism or not wouldn’t change anything because greed exists. My counter point is that, while greed exists and has always existed, it’s never been quite that bad in recent times and, for second, greed and capitalism feed and reinforce each other. It’s an endless loop that keeps reinforcing itself.

Also, do consider the fact that while I was highly upvoted here on Lemmy, the same wouldn’t be true at a random table with some friend group out there in the world. These opinions of mine that are popular here are fringe in the real world, so if you get the impression my comment is disconnected from reality and what people think when you touch grass, yes, that is precisely the point why I wrote it. This is my own little grumpy old man yelling at a clown view of a lot of modern things that I talk about in spaces like these online, but mostly shut up about when I’m out there having a drink.

Capitalism is growing, it has successfully seeped through every aspect of our life, creating consensus and effectively becoming more and more the norm in the social fabric. Right now there are many opinions against capitalism that are beginning to become almost taboo.

• It has taken our privacy: it is almost mandatory nowdays to use things like social media and operating systems that track you. You can’t opt out without being a social outcast. As much as I wish I could live with pure Linux on every single device I use (including my phone) and without touching any proprietary software (except games and professional software with no privacy - invading tracking, but that doesn’t work well financially with a FOSS business model) belive me I would. But I would have to give up so much, it becomes almost impossible.
• It’s beginning normal to defend profit and condone terrible things for profit. Everybody knows about how the supply chain relies on several human rights violations to continue, but it’s considered normal.
• It has instilled the idea that everything you do must be useful. I’m seeing the idea that your hobbies must be “productive” in some kind of tangible way in your life spread around more and more, and it is making us appreciate life less, as “doing it for the sake of doing it” is beginning to be shunned as an useless waste of time.
• Relationships are becoming molded by capitalism. Think about the dating apps culture, swiping left and right on people who basically sell themselves as products on a market. It is becoming normal to see different people in parallel and then just committing to the one you like best - as if you were trying a bunch of laptops in an electronics store. Relationships themselves are less committed and more transactional, as we are normalizing stuff that makes me raise both eyebrows at once. People are starting to become scared of commitment and scared of committing to one person. More and more people are not only opting out of monogamy, but shunning those who choose to practice it as some kind of close - minded conservatives. There is more and more pushing and popularity in something like fluid and open relationships - which allows you to be in a relationship but still be on the market, never fully commit to a person, always keep looking for something better to jump onto, and have a normalized free trial with your partner’s consent. While it does work for some people and I don’t put that in doubt, I feel like at large this is being used to commodify relationships, sell ourselves as products on a market, lose our ability to commit to another human and get used to returning people like an Amazon package. It’s literally treating relationships as products. People want to live in the comfort that, if they decide to try a MacBook Pro M2 and later a more powerful M3-based iteration comes out, they can smoothly transition to the newer model - but for relationships - which is, in turn, damaging the very idea of a serious long-term relationship.
• Likewise, we are becoming all too trigger-happy in throwing people away from our lives like yesterday’s trash. Is your relationship or friendship hitting a rough spot? Nuanced opinions are getting more and more rare. “They’re a narcisist and you need to cut them out”, “they’re gaslighting or manipulating you”, “They don’t deserve you, you should leave immediately”. It’s super good that we are finally starting to take mental health seriously, thank goodness this is one of the things where I think the present is much better than the past at, but people we are overdoing it and using it out of context. In a world where people are commodified, they are too considered as disposable as products, and as such, easy to throw away and replace. The tendency to do real and actual work to work on a relationship or friendship with a person you love is starting to go out of fashion.
• We are making people work several jobs at once and completely drain themselves to even be able to afford their rent and basic survival. Everyone is becoming lonelier. Real friendships and relationships are being replaced with parasocial ones - only accessible through proprietary software with Draconian privacy policies that you would be very hesitant to accept if you took the time to actually read them, of course. There is a push to get part of our social need met by watching “stories” and social media updates by friends, mistaking a few reactions and comments here and there for actual interaction, and parasocial romantic relationships are actively being sold on platforms like Onlyfans, where not only creators sell their content (which I think it’s fair - content is content and everybody should be free to distribute it and sell it as they want and take profit for it), but also chat (or, more often and more unethically, hire someone else to chat with) lonely people who pay them to have someone to talk to and a semblance of a connection, one they cannot get in today’s hyper capitalist lives with low energy and low free time
• The rise of the right. Have you noticed that, right around when capitalism has gotten this intense, it has become almost acceptable once again to be openly fascist, without euphemisms? Have you noticed the sudden rise in far-right leaders in elections worldwide? It’s not just you, this is happening, the far right is making a huge comeback.

I absolutely look like a boomer typing this, and I am fully aware of this. I hate absolutely everything about contemporary culture, except for the much higher attention to mental health, broader acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community, more attention on the problems of feminism and a few other things that I think are a net positive to out society. I think capitalism is fully to blame for most of the things that are going to shit right now.

Interesting. I wonder if it can run on my Raspberry Pi 3b+, or if the single GB of RAM doesn’t cut it, it will be up in my list of things to do together with immich, grocy, paperless-ng and NextCloud when I manage to build my real homelab. I’ve read enough horror stories about smaller instances disappearing so this seems like a good way forward?

Even then, I can’t say this is intuitive. I’m an advanced Linux user with sysadmin skills. I can pull this off in a few hours, but I doubt it’s the same for average Joe…

Fair point, but it seems absurd to me that a supposedly community-based instance gets harsher on privacy than a corporation that’s about to IPO. That seems off to me. Then again: lack of a big legal team. Understandable. Sad, inconvenient, but understandable. I’m not mad, I’m just sad. Mostly because this legal war on piracy is not only on piracy, but on software freedom (DRM, WEI, etc) and privacy (for a lot of media, there is no privacy-respecting way to legally acquire it)

Another thing that seems off is that this announcement has been made on the Discord server. Now, I don’t want to come across as that guy. I admit I use Discord regularly, because that’s what my friends are on and all efforts to migrate them to something more privacy-respective have been futile, mostly due to the lack of fleshed-out and comparable alternatives for now. But… why should a Fediverse instance have an official server on Discord? I feel like it kinda goes against the whole philosophy of this entire thing. Then again I’m new, so I might be in the wrong here. But wouldn’t a Matrix server or something be a better fit for this sort of thing?

Sync. I come from Reddit and that’s what my favorite client defaults to. It’s not optimal, because of the reason you say. I am totally OK with new apps presenting users with an easy “one-click” choice of instance to make onboarding easy, but having one accepted default has this side effect. If I were to maintain a Lemmy app, I’d probably select the “default” instance for a new user by selecting one at random in an array of popular instances, and then offer the user to subscribe to the official community of my app (wherever instance it’s on) to keep up. Maybe I can hit up the dev with some feedback on this on the official community.

And now, just like it ended up with Mastodon, I’ll have to maintain multiple accounts for Lemmy. Such a good user experience, it will totally catch on…

Seriously. Accept this piece of criticism from someone new to the Fediverse. Being harsher on piracy than a fucking corporation and forcing users to migrate accounts left and right / have multiple accounts to be able to easily access content out of your Mastodon instance’s niche and having to get around your instance defederating and blocking content you wanted to see is just abysmal UX. Are we supposed to have our content scattered around how many accounts? And for those who don’t like mobile apps, at this point I can only use Sync (Lemmy) and Tusky (Mastodon) through my phone to browse the Fediverse for lack of a good option to maintain multiple accounts on desktop. Firefox containers are just overkill for this, but I welcome suggestions.

End rant, and sorry if it’s a long-winded disorganized ramble. Is lemmy.ml good to get around this block?