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Sure, we know.

To replace the Facebook use
minds.com
MeWe.com

To replace Twitter use
gab.ai

To replace Youtube use
bitchute.com
real.video

In the early days of Android the built in music player sucked. There were some reasonable third party ones, and even some of the carriers and phone manufacturers came through with some reasonable ones, but the built in one sucked.

Then when the early version of the Play Music app (maybe it was called something else) came out it was awesome! It would take the music on my phone and make virtual stations out of them. It would catalog and categorize and make intelligent playlist, I loved it.

Then they introduced their stream service, they whored it out a little, but I ignored that and kept using it as is.

Then it started whoring a little stronger - to the point of making the app harder to use.

THEN it started streaming music over my metered mobile connection, I could manually set it back to local only, but it kept finding ways to stream. Any excuse it could make up it would stream instead of play local, even if the files were local to the device.

I tried to play nice with it. I uploaded all my OGG/Vorbis files to their cloud so it could be in both places. It would convert them to MP3s if I pulled them in on another device. Music I bought straight from the play store started to get truncated file names and double/tripple downloads, especially when using the Google created Linux music sync utility. I even opened tickets, they had me jump through hoops that went nowhere, they just scratched their head. Let me re-emphasize this for you :If I bought it from them it was much more likely to be hosed up than if I did it myself.

Yep, Power Amp it is.

Based on a history of unreliable bandwidth, metered connections, and lots of driving - especially in rural areas with no coverage I never could get on-board with streaming.

So - now that I have Power Amp, used to I could say "Okay Google Play Thunderstruck" and it would open PowerAmp my default player and play Thunderstruck for me. Now it demands I select a streaming service.

FUCK YOU AND YOUR STREAMING

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Minds.com, a social network created with top priorities being user privacy and freedom.

anonymous - the hacktivist group created a great full functioning alternative called MINDS. I have used it and the concentration of users are more toward power user/activists. very nice crowd.

The source code is opensource and they use encryption in the entire pipeline for security.

https://www.minds.com/

The very first thing I noticed after booting for the first time: they forgot how to draw boxes.

Something I've run into since - I can't "run as a different user" properly anymore. My company has a rule for admins - you can't work from your admin account, so I've been right-clicking my Microsoft Management Console link and choosing "run as a different user". That quit working - now it says the super user doesn't have access to the management console, but if I actually do login with my admin account - like I'm not supposed - it works fine, just like it did before the update. I can probably figure out some rights changes and work arounds to make it work - but is that what I should be spending my time on?

I've been a Microsoft hater for close to two decades - I've recently softened up on them because Windows 8 and 10 really did introduce a bloat reduction, stability, and performance severely lacking in previous versions, but crap like this and less than ethical data collection and advertising in the system itself are keeping me from embracing it on my personal stuff.

CNN is slow

No need for cheap shots.

Humor aside, https://www.minds.com/ was having issues also.

http://www.minds.com/blog/view/54569/former-fbi-chief-ted-gunderson-admits-government-is-involved-in-most-039terrorist039-attacks

Because it's not just "a few messages." Just now, I checked my mailbox, and it had about 30 messages in it since the last time I checked it (last night). Of those, maybe one or two were legitimate e-mails (routine messages that I could delete right away). Of the rest, about half were spam, and the other half were double-bounce error messages from the Electric Minds mail server--spam that someone tried to send to minds.com email addresses, that the server tried to bounce but failed for one reason or another (usually because the return address does not exist, or the machine would not handle the incoming SMTP connection properly), and hence that get passed to me.

When I get double-bounces back, I usually "blackhole" the address that the spam was sent to (i.e. set up that address as an alias to /dev/null). Occasionally, though, some companies will "carpet-bomb" the minds.com server with spam for random numerical addresses (like "00000001@minds.com"), and I have to blackhole an entire "from" domain (or range of "from" domains, as with the fscking bastards at edirectnetwork.net and opt-in-net.net). This is a royal pain to deal with on a daily basis, despite the fact that I use qmail as my mail server, which makes it easier to perform these operations.

That's why, whenever I hear someone say "I don't know why you guys hate 'spam' so much," I want to reach for my LART.

Eric

Eric
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Electric Minds was kind of a "spinoff" of the Well, created by noted online community guru Howard Rheingold after he had been a Well user for some time and written a book, The Virtual Community, which dealt in large part with the Well and his experiences there. Electric Minds was intended to be very Well-like in its operation, and, indeed, used the WellEngaged conferencing system on its server. Unfortunately, they couldn't make any money at it, and their principal financing partner (SoftBank) didn't come up with the cash they needed to keep their doors open.

At that point, the company I work for, Durand Communications (now owned by Online System Services Inc.) stepped in and bought Electric Minds. We worked hard to integrate the Electric Minds conferencing system with our existing online community-building server, CommunityWare, including the implementation of a conferencing system that mirrored the WellEngaged one. (I personally wrote a big chunk of that code.) The community members, in large part, were supportive of the move, as they had been expecting Electric Minds to completely shut down, and had been making plans to keep the community together.

Since that time, there have been problems, a number of them related to a "self-governance" movement for the community that never really panned out. There have been a number of server crashes and screw-ups, too. Yet, to this day, the Electric Minds community is still large and thriving, if somewhat altered in its makeup over time. (Rheingold left as community host some time back over internal divisions, and another longtime EMinds conference host is now running the community.) True, we never made any money from it, either, but we are now applying the lessons learned from Electric Minds in a whole series of new directions that do have revenue-generating potential.

So what was my point here? From what Salon has already done with their "Table Talk" conferencing system, I can see that they, too, understand the idea of "community." I'm not saying that the Well acquisition will be trouble-free for them or for the Well, but my expectation would be that the Well will survive at least as well as its offshoot has, because its new owners do understand "community," as well as the nature and "quirks" of the community they're buying into. (Those are important; you need to keep from alienating the longtime users if you want the community to survive. It's why we bent over backwards to essentially clone WellEngaged on our own software platform. Similarly, I wouldn't expect Salon to drop the old text-mode Well interface anytime soon.)

If they're smart, they won't concentrate on revenue right away, but they'll certainly apply what they learn from the Well to help make their site, and their business, even better.

Eric ("erbo" on EMinds)
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