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   Anna e só (anna@friend.camp)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jan-2025 22:16:56 JST Anna e só

   Android and iOS are both in the hands of giant American corporations, and so is Windows and macOS. The Linux Kernel may be a global collaboration project, but several distributions are tied to American corporations, and the Linux Kernel itself had recent problems tied to U.S. sanctions. A significant portion of our digital infrastructure is in the hands of Global North countries.

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     Anna e só (anna@friend.camp)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jan-2025 22:20:50 JST Anna e só

     in reply to

     Digging deeper, our dependency on Meta platforms and software is a project of many, many years. Zero rating made WhatsApp the number one communications app in Brazil and a lot of other Global South countries—it’s virtually impossible to do anything without it. Instagram is the chosen showcase platform of many business in Brazil—very few have their own website. It feels inescapable, and that effect is completely intentional.

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     Anna e só (anna@friend.camp)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jan-2025 22:28:12 JST Anna e só

     in reply to

     • Paul (Tex) Hewson

     @texhewson I have to do a lot through WhatsApp: scheduling doctor appointments; dealing with legal procedures with notary offices (for buying our apartment or getting married, for example); hiring health insurance; talking to professors and fellow students at uni; talking to my accountant; getting my electric bills because the private company who handles my state’s power grid refuses to help me access their app. 🤦🏻 I hate it.

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     Paul (Tex) Hewson (texhewson@datasci.social)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jan-2025 22:28:13 JST Paul (Tex) Hewson

     in reply to

     @anna I'm not global south but (a) I need a smartphone to park my car (b) I need WhatsApp to communicate with people in a Kayak club and (c) I use Facebook to stay in touch with some family members who are scattered around the world. I can see an answer to (c) (just tell them I will use email) but (b) is harder because it means asking volunteers to stop doing something they find convenient.

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     Anna e só (anna@friend.camp)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jan-2025 22:37:26 JST Anna e só

     in reply to

     There isn’t a day I look at every single piece of tech in my home without some apprehension. And that feels particularly daunting as someone who regained so much autonomy through tech.

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     Cairo Braga [toot] (cairobraga@toot.cairobraga.com)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jan-2025 23:21:21 JST Cairo Braga [toot]

     in reply to

     @anna that is also true in the FLOSS space, even in the Fediverse (the obvious difference from Big Tech being the possibility to fork and adapt). but still, Mastodon devs REFUSE year after year to listen to their non-white non-Global-North users when it comes to safety tooling in the software, for example. it is a descentralized federated free and libre open-source network but is still being originated by Global North people, their social notions and limited worldviews, and that is very problematic.