You’re absolutely right, now that I think about it. My bad. But yeah, it makes more sense to upstream and make the features toggle-able.

Not all instance owners may want all those features implemented. Not the same but kind of like how Beehaw doesn’t allow downvotes while other lemmy instances do.

It fluctuates. I’m back on 18 according to Connect. It’s not reliabke enough to be used fir a karma system, which is good imho.

It’s not similar between apps, either, even with the same account. If you’re on Android, you can use Voyager and Connect and it’ll show you different numbers. Another thing is that it fluctuates. I see my “karma” on Voyager is around 14 points now, whereas I made a post comment quite recently where I also checked and I had around 40.

So as a karma system, it’s unreliable enough imho that it’s not gonna (or shouldn’t) affect users as much as reddit’s karma system. It’s also another reason why I decided not to switch to kbin.

I just saw your post. I have this thread bookmarked since it’s pretty interestibg, tbh. I’d love to know what exactly happened.

I completely agree wih those 3 points, although I do think #1 is pretty weak (no offense, but I considered that and I wrote it off).

#2 is interesting because of the timing. I saw the owner post about it, but there was no indication that he was in a panic because of it. Personally, so far I am leaning towards this as the smoking gun, although the donation links being down kind of throws a wrench there.

#3 is something I believe can be significant. Problem is idk much about that area.

What’s your personal opinion about what happened?

Kudos to you. I’ve tried to degoogle myself (I’d say I was moderately successful until my last company came along), although it’s been a pretty irritating ride. Now I’m still very sensitive when it comes to security and privacy but not to the extent I was before.

I misplaced my phone a few days ago and didn’t think of looking for it until just yesterday. The only reason I did was for OTP for my banking apps (browser and Paypal still asked me for them). If not for those, I think I can pretty much go without a smartphone, tbh. My PC and laptop, though? Can’t.

Running your own search engine sounds very interesting. How steep would the learning curve be? And is it feasible for only personal use?