Comment on Why is Google allowed to remove purchases from our Play Store accounts without telling us?

• NotJustForMe@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  How does that make a difference?

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  • erwan@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The difference is that a hostile takeover can’t happen.

    Unless the founder still owns a majority of the shares, you can take control of a public company without needing the consent of the board (and CEO, founder, etc)

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    • BeAware@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      A hostile takeover doesn’t have to happen. If Gaben decides “fuck you all” and decides to close the company, then there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. It’s his company and it doesn’t owe you the privilege of continuing to exist.

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      • erwan@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I know it can happen, but that still makes a difference between public and private companies. That’s one risk less.

        Especially for Valve which is a very desirable company for their position as de facto PC games online store.

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  • Bayz0r@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah, it doesn’t make much difference, I just commented on the low-hanging fruit of what was clearly incorrect.

    My bigger problem is with your fear-mongering and the gibberish that assumes that self-hosted FOSS solutions are somehow a viable alternative for the majority of users. I’ll pick privacy-compromised convenient products 9 times out of 10 and actually spend my time doing things I want to do, and I’m pretty bored reading all the privacy nutjobs trying to tell me how to do things.

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    • NotJustForMe@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What fearmongering. Being cautious and talking about it is fearmongering now?

      And why shouldn’t privately run FOSS solutions be viable for the majority of users? Millions and millions are doing it.

      That’s like saying that cooking isn’t viable for home-use and that all people should just order their food, trusting that the service holds up their deal regarding quality. If they even follow a standard.

      It is just a matter of lifestyle and how much one values their own authority over things. You seem to be biased in this area, yet I’m sure, in other areas you are doing exactly what you are calling me a nut job for.

      You are throwing opinions out without any reasoning attached.

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      • Bayz0r@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Your claim: “root server, self-hosted everything and FOSS. If you can’t do your things with that, it ain’t worth doing anyway.”

        Do you really think I need to “reason” why this is utter nonsense? Fine, here you go. My elderly technically barely-literate father and mother are supposed to self-host their email servers so as not to just use Gmail? Old people who don’t speak English and use Netflix or HBO or whatever to stream movies and TV series are supposed to self host Jellyfin and torrent their stuff? They’re supposed to use OpenStreetMap to find directions around the city instead of Google Maps, because “privacy”?

        Maybe my grandparents should run GrapheneOS.

        Or perhaps you’re suggesting that, since they can’t root server and self-host FOSS stuff instead of using off-the-shelf products, they should just not watch anything other than cable TV, and write letters by hand and post them. And if they need to go somewhere that they don’t know the way to, they should just ask for directions on the street (and hope the person they’re asking doesn’t just pull up Google Maps, since then they’d be using it by proxy!), oldschool style.

        This is not viable, feasible, or possible. “Millions and millions are doing it” tells me you have little understanding of the scale at which modern technology is used. There are an estimated 7 billion smartphones in the world. Almost 2 billion gmail accounts. So the fact that “millions” are using self-hosted FOSS alternatives means… basically nothing.

        Home cooking has been a staple human activity for millennia. It is widespread, it’s a skill passed on from one generation to the next, slowly ingrained in people. And even then, the majority of people are absolutely trash at cooking, can barely cobble together one or two recipes, buy ready-made meals, have others cook for them, order out or go to restaurants. Your “root server, self-hosted everything and FOSS. If you can’t do your things with that, it ain’t worth doing anyway.” could be “buy your own ingredients and home-cook every meal you eat. If you can’t do your things with that, eating ain’t worth it for you” and it would still have been utterly ridiculous despite billions more people in the world having the ability to do it.

        You need to accept that self hosting and FOSS is for a fringe part of the population and suggesting it as the solution to the issues that currently exist with services like Steam or Google or Netflix is counter-productive. Maybe many generations from now it will be possible to have a sizeable amount of people using technology that way, but now ain’t it.

        And by the way, I’ve been on the Internet since like 1998, I went through Napsters and DC++ and I torrented tons and tons of things for years and years. But even for me, the idea of doing what you suggest is absolutely exhausting and not something I really want to find the time to engage in. “It is just a matter of lifestyle and how much one values their own authority over things.”, you say, and you’re right. That’s a much more reasonable stance than your original comment. The truth is I don’t care too much about the authority I have over “my media” or “my data”.

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