ⓝⓞ🅞🅝🅔

I seem to have a visceral reaction to advertisements. It’s very physical.

The short answer is that the Google Play version won’t actually block anything because it breaks their terms of service. So that version just tells you how many trackers and what the trackers are. I still use some of those apps and even respect them (e.g. AP News, AccuWeather), but it completely boggles my mind how they’ve loaded so many trackers into their applications… 🫤

Longer answer: To actually block trackers and ads, you need to use a third party source to download the app so that it’s fully functional. By providing the app that way, they don’t have to abide by Google Plays rules.

The link above is for the F-Droid “app store” version, which is one of the more well-known “stores.” I highly recommend F-Droid. They host free and open source (FOSS) applications. For most everything you use, there is a FOSS alternative which will be ad and tracker free.

https://f-droid.org/

Want a simple ad-free calculator, go there. Want to watch YouTube ad free, go there. Want to download an ad free Lemmy client, go there. Etc etc.

Hurrah for high quality FOSS software!

Yep. It’s becoming more and more common for folks to know that they can do it, but it certainly isn’t ubiquitous. It wasn’t that long ago when I caught my partner listening to music on YouTube with all the ads and I blew their mind away by installing NewPipe. They just had no idea.

Yep, that can work per device or per network. I’m a big fan of Tracker Control because it’s going to work on any network. It’s also highly customizable.

Fortunately, you can block all those ads on Android. Check out Tracker Control: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.fdroid

Because I’m not privileged enough to afford it without.

That’s absolutely unbelievable to me. I block ads on everything. I just can’t handle it. For the few ad-based services that I pay for, I mute it for every commercial. Seriously, I just can’t handle it.

But… clearly tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of people do watch them… which makes a massively lucrative business. I’ll just never understand it.

When I need something, I look it up and get it. If i don’t need something, I don’t want to hear about it in any way, shape, or form.

Ugh.

10 billion. 😖

I really really really don’t like where this is heading. Hell, I don’t like like where it already is. 😖

I want that purple stuff.

Dang. There was a brief hope. Just for a moment. 😁

🙄

Fake news 404 garbage! I saw an actual factual article on Truth Social showing not only the sign on fire, but Newsome himself stopping fire fighters from gaining access. These fires are only happening because of the incompetent liberals pretending to run the state. The so-called progressives are stream rolling America into oblivion!

If only they knew they could use “Threads” ad-free.

I’m a “discord admin” too! Nuts!

And this was how I learned that Video Station is no longer supported by Synology. If you want the updates, you’ll have to uninstall it.

☝🏽

Perhaps not an actual reclassification since, until now, all two letter TLDs have been exclusively for countries. But for the right price, I imagine convincing them to maintain the two character TLD… for “posterity” … and… “backwards compatibility”…

coughs, clears throat, and pushes 💰 across the table

…would make sense.

😏

Corporations with loads of money will ensure that this domain will simply get reclassified.