I have itsfoss in my RSS feed mostly to keep an eye on the FOSS community news in general, but will agree most of their articles seem to lean quite heavily into soft endorsing certain brands.

Sometimes it feels like people forget this used to be the only option. Was it a little annoying? Yeah. But oh well.

Ironically I remember reading somewhere that part of the reason people are so consistently shitty to each other is they forgot how to deal with the millions of little face to face interactions we had pre-internet in order to get things done in life. How ironic would it be if big tech forced us back into that mold and we all became a bit nicer because of it?

You know what, that’s fair.

Agreed, it’s an odd move when so much else about the phone is being marketed as having the user’s interests at heart. If you scratch a bit and squint at the wording they’re using, though, it feels more and more like the CEO has his own idea of how people should be using their phones and is pushing that. The fact that it is more privacy respecting is incidental to the fact. I could be wrong, but that’s the vibe I’ve certainly gotten.

It’s too bad. I wouldn’t mind having a phone with no social media but no browser is probably going to be a dealbreaker for me. Their FAQ says it’s basically a way of ‘cheating’ to get to social media sites and that’s incredibly condescending. I probably just want to look up if a nearby store is still open or something.