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.
I switched to Vivaldi and Ecosia, barely notice a difference.
Ecosia is OK, but if you use Vivaldi (I’m guessing it’s Chromium) you will give power to Google. If we want to fight Google, there are three main areas.
1 - The most important is search (fortunately they suck and it’s easy to change).
2 - The second most important is Chromium (there is only one alternative, Firefox - I don’t count Safari because it’s for Apple devices). Firefox has Manifest V2; if we lose this, we lose great power.
3 - The third most important is YouTube. I think this is the hardest one because maintaining a video-sharing platform is very expensive, and it’s not something that can live just with donations.
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.
I’m not talking about “now”; I’m talking about the future. Enshittification is inevitable in proprietary software.
Free-software licenses provide risk mitigation against different legal threats or behaviors that are seen as potentially harmful by developers:
source
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.