The issue is really that Kakao is not just a comic app.

They are basically the Meta/Facebook of South Korea, one of the most valuable companies in the whole country, and they are in quite literally every facet of South Korean life.

They do instant messaging (KakaoTalk), payments (KakaoPay), banking (KakaoBank), public transportation (Kakao T), games (Kakao Games) and probably way more I’m forgetting. If you’re in south Korea you cannot live without Kakao almost.

Webtoons are not a significant portion of their income, but they have so much disposable income and such a drive to go after pirates that they don’t care.

Their actual audience in South Korea is very anti piracy too and support these moves. It’s a very similar case in Japan, but not even the richest Japanese manga publishers are as filthy rich like Kakao, they mostly spend their resources fighting piracy within their borders and leave it at that.

Also the monetization model you’re describing is unfortunately the most profitable currently. They employ it because it works. Webtoons are also by far, and I mean by faaaar, the most consumed comic format. Majority of the public is now reading comics on their phones and Webtoons thrive there. So there’s a very big financial incentive to go after mobile apps because of it.

Unfortunately that’s also the primary reason Kotatsu was targeted and shutdown

Bundling the sources with the app has become very risky because one specific multi-billion dollar Korean company (Kakao) has openly made it their mission to hunt down these apps’ creators and nobody can stop them. They literally brag on Twitter about it and everything.

So the best way to avoid litigation and ensure longevity at the moment is to completely separate the app/reader from the actual sources of content.

But it’s not that inconvenient. Once you add the repository url you can see all the available extensions in-app and download the ones you want. They are also updated automatically so it’s not that involved after the initial setup.

All Mihon forks also have an update checker so you’ll pretty easily keep the main app updated as well.

Mihon or any of its forks:

• Komikku
• Yokai
• TachiyomiAZ
• TachiyomiSY
• TachiyomiJ2K

Note you will need to add the extensions manually but that’s pretty easy to do. This is to avoid DMCA issues like what happened a few months ago with Tachiyomi and now Kotatsu (same company that took down both FYI)

They now use LTS chips designed for IoT devices

This is no longer the case for the Fairphone 6. It uses a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3, which is a regular SoC for mobile devices. I believe this is because Qualcomm finally extended support for these chips past 5 years.

Doesn’t Twitter directly suppress such links? I remember there was a crackdown on people linking their mastodon accounts a while back.

And external links in general get a huge suppression in the algorithm because Twitter does not want to recommend tweets that take you off the site.

The platform actively fights you if you want to move elsewhere (which should really be a telltale sign for you to move), so I get why some orgs struggle with that decision. Doubly so if your job relies on the platform’s outreach.

This is to me one of the major reasons Twitter discourse is completely ruined and the platform is mostly useless for seeing what people think now.

When the only people who get to be at the top of discussions are people who pay for twitter, the only opinions that get shared are those that are pro Twitter, pro Elon, etc. Because they have a direct stake in the game.

And that’s if the accounts posting aren’t all bots that pay for a checkmark to boost engagement, which is almost all I see when I occasionally have to check Twitter these days.

So glad more people are leaving it. There’s nothing to gain from it anymore.

From a regular user standpoint pretty much all modern browsers throw up warnings and block the page from initially loading if it’s not https, which discourages people from viewing it.

This is not true. The app is free and has no listening limits.

What you can pay for is a web player (for pc), cross device syncing, cloud storage, extra themes, and some other perks.

Been using pocket casts for like 7 years now with no complaints.

It means that the forced arbitration provisions do not apply to you if you’re in the EU, so you can still sue them by other means and with people not paid by them.

The alternative is on desktop always get your smartphone, open some app type a token or on the phone to switch to multiple apps to get your credentials. Not fun imho.

There are desktop apps for OTP, you don’t need a phone. And since you only need to setup an OTP secret once, doing it for your phone and pc isn’t that big of a deal.

I have my OTP secrets in 3 places, 2 yubikeys and my phone’s authenticator app, with the former meant for my PC.

For me, the key benefit of 2Fa is getting more security against leaked, stolen, phished passwords, and that still holds up.

If your vault doesn’t have 2FA too this doesn’t hold up though. Means you’re trusting a single service that can get hacked with all your secrets. Sure, your other accounts are more protected against leaks and stuff, but if your password vault isn’t, you didn’t really change much, just pointed the hackers to one single place.

Yes I know hacking a password vault isn’t some walk in the park and rarely happens, but the point is any leaks from it would be 10 times more catastrophic for you if all your OTP secrets are also stored in it. I’ll spare myself from that nightmare with the small inconvenience that is a separate, offline OTP app.

This isn’t really a good idea because then you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. The whole point of 2FA is that the second factor is in a separate location so if your first factor (password) gets compromised the second one (OTP code) still protects your account. If both factors are in one place you’re back to a single point of failure instead of 2, losing a key benefit of 2FA.

If you’re gonna do this, at the very least have 2FA with a security key on your bitwarden vault.

Yeah it’s not the perfect model for sure. Usually you did get updates to fix vulnerabilities and bugs, but any major version release would require a new purchase/license.

But any software that requires connecting to a server anywhere just doesn’t work in this model.

In the end there’s not much of a choice. Either you pay more for apps to compensate for the time spent on them, subscribe to reduce your costs and assure continuous revenue, or ads.

Anything that’s perpetually free, unless it has massive communities willing to maintain it, typically ends up like the tools we see here: abandoned/sold.

In ye old days the reigning model was a pseudo subscription where you paid for a version of a program and that’s all you got, if you wanted the next version of that program you had to buy it again. This made developing updates profitable and people who didn’t care to pay for the update could still use the outdated program. It wasn’t perfect by any means but I feel like it was one of the better compromises compared to everything else.

Sadly with the advent of mobile apps such a model is heavily discouraged.

Not just normies. I liked using thunderbird but it felt so bloated for my use case (not to mention the sluggishness) . I just want to read my email, I don’t need an entire suite of things like calendars or extensions (I understand why people use them, I just do not need or want them). Mailspring was by far the best option for me.

Glad to see it finally being introduced in my country! Sadly they won’t accept trade ins for the 7, which means I’ll be passing on this until the 7 is EoL.

Remember duet? Pepperidge Farms remembers.

WearOS is just a lot more taxing on the battery than what Garmin has because it does a lot more. The upside is that you get an entire ecosystem of 3rd party apps/services you can install.

Apple’s own apple watch doesn’t last much longer unless you basically disable everything.

Smart watches that work like a phone are inherently always going to have worse battery than smart watches that are only programmed to do a very narrow set of things.

I use both but I found listenbrainz not so great for finding new music. I definitely agree it’s waaaay better at tagging though because people actually clean up the database and it’s easy to contribute yourself too.

For the recommendations part, the best solution for me was to switch to a scrobbling platform like last.fm.

This way, regardless of what I’m using to listen to music, I can go there for recommendations based on what I listen to.

I don’t know what the experience is like for other people but KDE connect sucked to use on windows for me. It was a coin toss whether or not it would detect my devices. Nearby Share has been flawless so far.