Yeah, Swift backup is the go to now

For what it’s worth, fixing safetynet is like a module or two and a couple reboots.

What does it break? I’ve always had a rooted phone and outside of Google pay, have never had anything not work.

Fixing safetynet is just another magisk module (or two, it’s been so long I don’t remember anymore).

I’ve never had a phone that hasn’t been rooted and also have always been able to use every app. Google pay might get pissy occasionally, but every banking app has always worked.

Ruin your life and possibly lots of others if any country goes to war against those specific machines.

Spying is one crime that absolutely deserves the death penalty.

Apparently nearly everything I look for in a phone. Others have said IR blaster, side squeeze, notification light, and pop-up front camera, all of which were amazing.

I’d add an unlocked bootloader (I bought it, it’s my phone to do what I want with), removable battery (hello instant charging), and a small form factor (so sick of needing two hands to do anything).

Man I’m a techie through and through and have been so excited for some true innovation in phones.

But there’s NO way I’m paying close to $2k for a phone. That’s the shittiest cost-benefit ratio I’ve seen in a long time.

Apparently most of my requirements/desires fit this. I require an unlocked bootloader, because I need root to not throw my phone through a window. An amazing camera would be needed as well.

I REALLY, REALLY would like a removable battery, IR blaster, small form function, a headphone jack, and a rear fingerprint reader.

I’ve never subscribed to any of these things, due to multiple reasons like being broke, because I knew I’d never remember to cancel it if I quit using the service, hating subscriptions, realizing most of these collapse almost as fast as they skyrocket, among many other reasons. I know I’m a pessimist.

But it’s time to put my money where my mouth is, even if I just want a Reddit alternative. I’m old and grumpy enough to be sick of companies using people the way they do, and since I can’t code, I can pay.

If you’ve read this far, I implore you to really sit down and think about what this project means to you, what it could mean to you, and what it’s worth to you. Everyone does the whole coffee analogy - give up coffee for a day and you can support X. But as a Reddit refugee, I think that if I was willing to give Reddit a couple bucks a month to an app for their API access, why on earth wouldn’t I do the same here (even before all of Reddit’s recent BS)?

You can either pay or be the product being sold.

I sort by hot and have seen the same posts 3 days in a row. I’ve actually had to completely switch to new to see anything outside of the same posts I’ve seen for days.

I’m in the same boat, which is why I both got aggregated and why I’m still here.

Touche. I explained elsewhere, but I was frustrated after hearing that everyone in Reddit had turned against the blackouts. There were a few other reasons, but none worth getting into.

For what it’s worth, while I haven’t deleted my main Reddit account, I currently have no plans to go back. I’ve always been a proponent of having multiple options, so everything being at Reddit alone never sat well with me. I had tried lemmy and a few other things some time ago - usually when everyone protested Reddit - hoping something caught on. It usually ended up the same way - influx of people, fighting due to old vs new members, fracturing, quick abandonment, and everyone leaving.

I’m really hoping that doesn’t happen in this case, even if Reddit goes back to normal.

But for the average person, would new mods opening everything up be worse than staying shut down? The average person doesn’t inherently care about mods.

And from comments here, people have either turned against the blackouts, Reddit brass has fixed commenting to seem that way, and/or bots have made it seem that way.

Admittedly, it was a knee jerk reaction. I was annoyed since I had just read a bunch of comments/articles that basically said Reddit had completely reverted to normal. Once I really read what they said and poked around, yeah, no big loss there.

I like how lemmy wanted to replace Reddit, but within days it’s starting to completely crumble.

Exactly. What’s going to happen? 30 yr dev cycles?

I mean I’m a fan of elder scrolls. What’s going to happen it its development cycle?

So growing up my uncle taught me all about computers. We built them together (early 90s, so DOS days - not even MS-DOS), built the drivers together, etc. Ended up being a pretty significant hobby for me even now.

Going to college, I thought that since tons of my generation were going into computers, we’d flood the market, pay would crash, and every subsequent generation would have tons of people too, so companies would hire the young college kids.

Now, I realize I screwed up. People older than me have no idea about computers. People younger than me have no idea about computers. They use them all the time, but almost have even less understanding of how they actually function than older people. My guess is that older generations had to make everything work, so they have a bit of knowledge to use to figure out new things. Younger generations have had everything catered to them, so they haven’t ever had to figure a single thing out. If it doesn’t make perfect sense to them immediately, they leave.

Just yesterday I couldn’t figure out how to find a profile I followed on Instagram. There was a fresh out of college kid I work with that kind of chuckled and made a (good natured, but naively insulting) remark that basically insinuated I was too old to get tech. I couldn’t take it, so I told her that I was actually using the first phone I hadn’t put a custom OS on and how a couple Xmas’ ago, I had built an unRAID server because I was sick of my computer bogging down with all the extra stuff I had it do. They hadn’t even heard of a command line before.

So long winded rambling aside, it makes me sad that no one knows, or even wants to know, how things work anymore. They seem to want it served to them and the slightest amount of work will make them move on. Every generation says the kids are horrible, etc, so I’m hoping it’s just that and we’ll still have a generation of scientists and engineers.

Absolutely detest them. I still consistently play old games because they’re a blast and make me remember when I was a kid. That won’t happen for my kids with their games, as the servers will be long gone and close to zero companies are going to spend more time updating the game to not need a server. I’m an old man yelling at my lawn, but games went from trying to entertain to trying to suck every cent they can out of you.

One of my biggest enjoyments is hacking games up as well. You can learn about coding (set ammo to -1 - is it unlimited, 0, or game crashing). Sometimes it’s fun to be a god after a stressful day. Sometimes my kids play with me and I don’t want to have to tell them no, worry about them dying every couple seconds and getting frustrated, or having to drop it altogether.

I just want to buy a damn game and play it how it entertains me the most - not have to deal with server errors, not have to deal with 12 year olds screaming, not have to deal with people who have far more time than I do being 1000x better.

So far I have no problems with 99% of what everyone else seems to have. It’s not super intuitive to sign up and figure out all the instances/sites, but it wasn’t THAT hard and I’m not planning on signing up too often. Finding new subreddits (for lack of the terminology knowledge) really needs to be improved - it took me well over a day to figure it out (but admittedly I was only using jerboa).

The only things that bug me are some missing quality of life features my 3P Reddit app had, like automatically making as read when scrolling past and being able to quickly hide/dismiss seen content. I’m not used to seeing the same articles over and over. Also, and it’s pretty dumb, but being able to double tap for up vote and triple tap for down vote. Don’t need it, just drive myself crazy since it’s so ingrained.

The only other “complaint” I have is simply the amount of content. I was subscribed to quite a few niche subreddits that fit my interests/humor well, and those obviously haven’t migrated over. The YEARS of help in computer subreddits or whatever isn’t here. There’s no crazy specific subreddit to discover with tons of content.

With all of that being said, I currently have zero plans or desire to go back to Reddit, and it really hasn’t been all that hard so far. I swapped out my homescreen shortcut on my phone and I’ve been enjoying my time so far. I’m desperately hoping that this doesn’t die out in a couple days/weeks/months because it’s good to have competition, Reddit is effectively dead to what I need it to be, and I have zero desire to give Reddit any money after their views on us came out (to name a few reasons of many).

I also hope the toxicity stays away, but I’m not that naive. And I’m REALLY hoping that people with more time than I have bring over their comments/posts so I can search for them here. Reddit was one of the last places I knew that wasn’t stuffed full of ads and bot-generated, search-optimized posts that made little sense and didn’t help at all.