This is actually a really interesting article.

It looks at how social media has evolved, who owns it, and whether it is fundamentally still “social.”

Yes, there are a couple import tools for Google Takeout, and you should absolutely use one. I don’t recall if I used this particular tool, but it is strictly necessary to get a clean import.

Other examples:

Google Photos Takeout Helper - Readme includes detailed step by step instructions.

Takeout Helper Neo - a fork of the above with additional features

Photo Migrator - designed to work with multiple services

That’s why I no longer stop at red lights. Thats just theft of life. My car also works just fine on either side of the road; limiting it to just one is imprisonment. /s

Sure, this small and mid-size services are just fine for backing up your data, and should surely be used as such. But using “cloud services” is nonsense. Too bad it has such good marketing.

I’m increasingly convinced that “The Cloud” is just a scam. Just keep your own files.

They Are Certainly Giants

Yes, exactly. Several photo gallery apps do this.

Once the technology exists, we need clanker laws.

Make it illegal to generate ML output without a positive watermark.

Why do either?

Wikipedia is suspect now too. They’ve sold the site to AI search. Hard to say that they had much of a choice, but the sure did it swiftly and gleefully.

I was posting about these kind proton pricing shenanigans months ago and no one was listening.

“Just match the colors!”

“There’s no yellow… It’s just red and white.”

“That’s impossible. Move out of the way!”

“…”

“My God.”

“What do we do now? I’m scared.”

Tempus is phenomenal. I switched to navidrome on my server to use it. Chora is also good, and I use it on my TV (works well on any screen). If you don’t mind closed-source, Symphonum is excellent.

If you are using Jellyfin, it works well on PC, with Fintunes on mobile.

You can find a number of good apps for navidrome here. I quite like Strawberry, which is cross-platform. I use it locally for library management.

I connect everything with Tailscale, which is dead simple.