AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2025

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  • Yep! It’s not the same experience as F-Droid (e.g. it’s not gonna be you scrolling through a list of apps, picking the one you want, and hitting install. Obtainium is more of a “get the URL to where the app’s releases are, paste it in here, add it, then hit install, plus you might have to do a little config so it selects the right release if there are multiple”, but once it’s set up, it’s set up.

    I fully replaced the F-Droid app with Obtainium for actually installing and updating apps, but I still keep the F-Droid app around just because I can go on there, search up apps, do a little browsing, then take the app I want and put it in Obtainium.




  • Depends on which Lemmy app you want. Here’s the ones on F-Droid, and for Obtainium you should be able to get all of those, plus any Lemmy app that only has a code repo but isn’t published elsewhere.

    Keep in mind that F-Droid is only gonna have things that are free and open source, with minimal to no tracking or external dependencies outside their primary use case. Apps that are normally paid or have a lot of trackers probably won’t be on there.

    If you find something only available on the Google Play Store, either use sandboxed play services (does give Google some information, like your IP address, knowledge of which apps you have installed, and could potentially exfiltrate data if an app is configured to send the data to Google Play Services), or Aurora Store (just a frontend for the Play Store, Google doesn’t really get much info about you from that as long as you pick the Anonymous option when “signing in”, but you have the added risk that the Aurora Store developers could theoretically tamper with app code)

    You should always try to find apps available in this order, based on their chance of having code tampered at any point, and privacy concerns: Obtainium > F-Droid > Aurora Store > Sandboxed Play Store


  • Rumble is pretty bad. There’s not very many good alternatives to YouTube, but if you at least want a more privacy-preserving mobile app frontend for it, I’d recommend NewPipe or GrayJay (which, if you really want it, also supports Rumble, among very much lesser used federated alternatives like Peertube.)

    I wouldn’t recommend alternative decentralized video hosting platforms like Odysee either, as they are also very much heavily focused on conspiracy theories and random BS political topics with no merit. Kick funds destructive gambling behaviors and also funds fascists, so don’t use them either.

    If you’re willing to pay, and your main priority is just deGoogling over specifically maximizing privacy as much as possible, you could pay for a Nebula subscription. They’ve got a lot of the creators you might be used to seeing on YouTube, with all their content on YouTube also on Nebula, along with some Nebula exclusive stuff. Normally it’s 60 bucks a year, but I believe if you use creator codes from the sponsor reads creators will do on YouTube, you can get it for about $30-$36. Imo it’s a pretty reasonable price if you just don’t want to have to deal with YouTube. (and it is also supported by the GrayJay app)






  • UPDATE: The article has now linked to the newly published study. It claims a maximum concentration of bisphenols of 351mg/kg, above the 10mg/kg limit proposed by ECHA, but they don’t give any concrete numbers on how likely any of those bisphenols are to actually leech from the product into your body. The average sum of all bisphenols/sample was just 15. They note the parts not touching the skin often had more bisphenols than the parts actually touching the skin, with about 50% more of those areas than the non-skin-contacting ones being put in their “green” category, meaning it’s fairly in compliance with most protective standards.

    Of the parts touching the skin, 68% were green, 21% yellow, and 11% red.

    And onto flame retardants, 100% of products with HFRs were green, and 84% with OPFRs were green.

    For pthalates, 87% were green, and less than 1% were red.

    Essentially, the TLDR is that most of the things they tested either met most standards, were very close to meeting them, or technically didn’t meet standards but mostly just in areas that didn’t even come in contact with the skin at all. AKA, it’s mostly overblown.

    Original Post:
    No source linked by the article, no visible press releases that don’t just pretend to be a real press release while citing the articles, no official blog posts, and the only official sounding mention of this that comes from a more direct source is a coalition on linkedin saying a person at a sub-group of the broader project was gonna talk with them about it.

    No stats, no numbers, just “they found it” in the headphones.

    You could find a chemical well under the safe limit in drinking water, and say “we found x in your water” and make a big scare of it when it’s not a big deal.

    While I have no doubt BPA and its counterparts could be used in manufacturing of headphones, without any actual data, this is literally no better than when your uncle at Thanksgiving starts yapping about how the government found some data one time and that means you should never drink tap water again.