Sorry, don’t have any sort of ham radio license or anything 😂

I think in most cases it’s added functionality and convenience at the cost of privacy, sure the scale is still gonna tell you how much you weigh, but what if it automatically saved that to an app so you can track your weight loss progress without writing it down manually (as long as you’re OK with some company also having that info so they can share ads with you for weight loss products to help you reach that goal faster without allowing you to build the habits to do it right.

Isn’t it nice that you can just ask your fridge if there’s milk in it while you’re at the store rather than hoping you have milk, or assuming you dont? Disregard the fact that Samsung is using that fridge to know whether or not you’re home right now, if you have an iPhone, or what kind of smart TV you have. It’s still a fridge, it still keeps things cool, until a firmware update breaks that of course, guess you just need to buy a new fridge, it’s been a couple years anyway.

Sometimes (though not often) the smart appliance is cheaper since they know they’re gonna make money on the data.

Maybe it’s an issue of perspective. I see them as replacements for Twitter and Facebook and for me specifically I was posting the same things on both, its just that I had some people exclusively on one or the other, so when deciding to cut things, it made sense for me to only setup one given not many people I was communicating with were using either Mastodon or Friendica. I guess the core issue is either I’ve never really been using social media properly, or I just don’t know what the core usecase/structure for Friendica/Facebook actually is.

Genuine question, are there a good number of people using Friendica? I looked at it back in like 2017 or whenever Hak5 did a video about setting up Friendica servers, but it always seemed like Mastodon was the way to go, I know they aren’t technically filling the same space, but still.

Edit: can’t type on mobile