Solved. Had to run flatpak remove --all followed by flatpak repair to prune caches, then re-install every app again. But configs and logins seem to remain intact.

Probably tens or even hundreds of millions*

I joined shortly before Musk takeover and it was already a dumpster fire, so I made a script that searched for spam and fascist dogwhistles in the background and preemptively blocked them all 24/7 up to the rate limit. Two years later and well over 300k blocked accts later I gave up and deleted the account after seeing it barely even made a dent in the threads I was reading there.

I used to run an LTE-enabled nettop instead of a phone during the app-only craze, can’t get any worse than that. Recently removed bank apps, taxi, delivery, maps, youtube, email and all social media apps off my phone in favour of using websites instead. They’re still a bit of an afterthought compared to apps so the experience is a bit clunky, but the option is available for most things nowadays.

The classic card payment and subscription model is actually insane. You literally have to beg companies to stop taking money from you. Good thing it is changing with more modern payment systems - you literally just stop paying for services you don’t need and it’s on them to stop providing them to you. Nothing is ever charged off my account without an explicit action from me.

But what about TESO?

No, not really, kind of. VPN protocols are cut regardless if it’s domestic or not. You can still use something like tunneling or proxies, but at this point you’d be better off just connecting to a box abroad directly.

It is indeed total ass. Reporting from the ground here, mobile internet is effectively dead - cloudflare is banned and most vpn protocols are cut after 20kb. There are still ways, like ssh forwarding, amnezia and zapret, but the trend is towards blocking all encrypted traffic going abroad. Complete outages are also common as well.

Wired is a bit better, I see disruptions frequently between my ru and non-ru nodes, but it’s usually between two hosts and relayable, no complete ban like on mobile.

Max is on track of becoming mandatory. It already is for school students and their parents. Gosuslugi (gov services) already show an option to use it for auth, there are alrwady deeper integrations on the way that would make it a requirement.

It is pretty openly spied upon. I’m not touching that shit with a six foot pole, but there were already arrests over things said in voice-calls and I’ve even heard reports of FSB agents interjecting right in the middle of the call, saying they’re being too annoying and force-hanging the call.

Doesn’t work, though. Every other business in Russia is still asking for WA for contact. I’ve been using extremist excuse for the past year as for why I’m not in it, because I can’t be too arsed to explain that I’m not using an aggressively proprietary phone-only garbage from a privacy-violating corporation. They’re still asking, even after the recent ban. Honestly, I should just straight up report them to the police at this point.

But dont try to use it in Russia (or Iran, or anywhere with authoritarian government). That’s how you put a target on your head.

I’d suggest matrix but it kind of sucks as well.

Any other options?

Haha, thanks, please do.

This post makes it look like there’s something serious ly wrong with openvpn, but it’s just them not wanting to deal with it and deprecating it.

Oh well, guess Ill put a note not to use them. My country blocks VPN protocols and wg specifically, so for my usecase I need as many protocols supported as possible, preferrably mimicking other innocuous protocols.

This is working as intended, though. In most cases, nobody cares how stoked you are about the product, people mostly care which flaws the product has. With a target average of, say, 4.5, the 5-star system gives you options to give +0.5 stars all the way down to -3.5, giving negative reviews significantly more weight.

relevant xkcd

Just like the recent US-brokered “peace deal” between Armenia and Azerbaijan, where Armenia gave up everything and the violent dictator Aliev pinky promised not to attack them again…

I was perusing that map recently. Was kinda funny seeing a bunch of ships with clearly Russian names like “Admiral Yuri Dolgoruky” or “Cosmonaut Eugene Ponasenko” under Mongolian flag, of all others Yeah, the landlocked country. I guess there’s nothing wrong with landlocked country owning ships, but I just could’t get this meme out of my head

I just realized I have never left part D in my life… Gotta travel more

Those art pieces are literally poison to a young aspiring artist’s mind. It condemns them to a life in poverty, chasing dreams of becoming high profile abstract-postmodernist-whatever artist selling shits in jars, instead of focusing on making what the world really needs the most: