Link: https://en.royanews.tv/news/67740/Palestinian-social-app-Upscrolled-removed-from-Google-Play-Store

Google Play has delisted UpScrolled, the "censorship-resistant" social media app founded by Issam Hijazi, following its rapid growth to over 2.5 million users and its brief stint as a top-ranked alternative to TikTok.

While the app remains available for existing users, Google has not provided a specific reason for the removal; UpScrolled's team confirmed they are working with the Play Store for reinstatement while maintaining their commitment to unfiltered content.

This development follows the app's rapid ascent in popularity, particularly amid concerns over content moderation on competing platforms like TikTok.

They still haven't removed twitter for the AI generated child porn.

Nice

LOL WHAT?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.upscrolled.app

I switched to Vivaldi and Ecosia, barely notice a difference.

My main problem now is that Google has a monopoly on the Android app store. Plus, most banking apps use play services, so good luck using your own phone ROM.

the only thing I can't replace yet is Maps. reviews, photos, in-trip driving instructions, it's just so full-featured I can't imagine myself without it

YouTube has to be replaced with a decentralized torrent-like based system where every user shares the load with what they are watching.

For #3, how much would it actually cost to host a medium sized YouTube channel on peertube? I top off my prepaid hosting costs every few years to cover my website's remarkably high traffic (just me and a few other people :P). Consequently I have no idea how much it would cost to self host a site with actual visitors and video content.

My bank has a mobile site that is more functional than their app. I guess that's not the case for every bank.

It would be a great solution for most media only because computers are so fast and have excellent connections nowadays. I think if everyone just hosts their own content through a system like this we can preserve even niche content.

Obviously there would be some serious technical hurdles such as search. It wouldn't be a magic bullet, but a good compromise to the top-down Monopoly we have now.

Don't use brave it's still chromium/ pays Google

OSM from F-Droid is the way, but there are a lot of apps now based on OSM data that are also very good like organic maps. It can be hard to switch over saved data, and you might lose some of the conveniences, but it's manageable or even better for some uses like hiking.

Waterfox ftw.

Honestly Firefox is fine for now until they add their AI shit

Vivaldi also kept Manifest V2, so old extensions do keep working there. They also have a mastodon server, and email/calendar/feeds, so they offer more out of the box than Firefox. Lots of projects built on other open source projects like Chromium and KDE do offer legitimate alternatives.

Has anyone here actually tried the app? The first (and thankfully last) time I tried it, it was full of nazis and actual CSAM. Maybe too censorship resistant for its own good??

Tbh until today I had zero idea if was Palestinian

You are probably right that low quality clickbait, or ultra long-form content couldn't survive under that model. Also, the recodes and regional hosting for sites with a global reach adds cost.

With that said, I wonder if the economics work out better for a group of people who share an interest and want to cultivate a community around it. All 10k channels don't need to go on one server. For me, I think being decentralized is a key part of the benefit. I see the folks on urbanists.video doing the peertube thing very well. I talked to them a while back because I couldn't find a way to pitch in for server costs and it sounded like they were self-funding while they figured out their open collective. We're limited on what we can learn from them because the viewcounts aren't in YouTube's ballpark and the creators post both places and probably owe a lot of their exposure to the YouTube algorithm rather than Peertube. Nevertheless, the Urbanism folks have sown the seeds to get out from under YouTube's thumb and Google themselves will water that seed by enshittifying their own product. I'm curious to see it continue to develop.

Does anyone around here run a Peertube?

The real cost of a centralized platform like YouTube also includes giving up the freedom of communities to set their own standards, and while it isn't a monetary cost, I think it's worth careful consideration.

It could be a good thing to have an internet with less slop and more high quality content produced by people and for people. How we decide that will likely be contentious. I'm sure there's some very rich people out there who would be thrilled if poor people couldn't afford to be heard outside their own communities.

Not everything is worth the disk space it's saved on (and 3 backups of course). YouTube has become increasingly filled with such content. That AI generated listical video of the 10 best ways to painlessly pluck nose hairs probably won't make the cut. If users have some skin in the game, if it feels like their space and their communities again, perhaps things will improve.

Some sort of torrent tube that let's you seed what you star react could be a useful way of giving videos wider reach as they gain popularity within an organic community. Upvotes would mean something if every upvote stored a 1MB video fragment on your device for seeding.

Yeah I haven't seen any of what you saw.

And yet it has some of the best fingerprint randomization techniques. Down to some insane details. And before you say, just use the Tor browser for that... I do. But that is a different type of resistance, uniformity. Which is great for some use cases, but randomization also works even better in other situations... Eg, personalized browsers with a few extra extensions and customizations.

Right. I saw that. That's good to bad it's opt-out rather than opt in. Applaud Firefox for that though, rather than everyone else shoving it down your throat the second you sign in.

I fucking despise israel and their bootlickers.

While I agree with what you're saying, this is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Funding sources and incentives also matter, GPL projects don't enshittify, but it can be harder to build a community with those developers who would like a more permissive license, while most but maybe not all Apache projects can remain faithful to their missions and not enshittify. More competition means I as a user can choose from features and other things too, and not just the license.