They don't care about what policy you violate. They want to force you to give away PII (Personally Identifiable Information) to put in their databases in exchange for access to a "free" account. Which is more important to you, your privacy or access to a glorified photo gallery app with commenting? I choose my privacy.
I have no problem with giving my phone number in exchange for a free service. If that changes in the future, there are a lot of self hosted Fediverse options. I just don't understand the charade of suspending a user and needing to go through an "appeal" process which automatically approves you. Just ask for the phone number during registration. I can't help but wonder if this is a plausible deniability thing where they can tell EU regulators they only collect phone numbers when they suspect fraud, and leave out that they've engineered their systems to suspect fraud by default for all new accounts.
If they were honest, more people would opt out of the deal. The waste your time signing up for an account so that there's a loss incurred by abandoning it. Then accusation is a lie that probably helps shame some percentage of people into complying or makes them afraid they've accidentally committed a crime or maybe their new account has been hacked and will be used nefariously if they don't comply.
Meta even uses this to extort driver's license scans out of long existing accounts. Twitter and Microsoft both use this altered the deal scam to get phone numbers as well for new accounts. Meta and Twitter have both been fined for using 2FA numbers for tracking in the past. They want that PII and they don't have a problem with outright lying and misusing data to get at it.
because it is that cold-blooded; it is not an agreement between equals. hint- you have no options but what they provide, can be changed at their whim basically
It doesn't seem to be that people are complaining about the service defining the rules, merely that the service is dishonest about what they want in exchange for your use of the "free" service.
you are one person, and one person counts for nothing.. it is a Great Game and the participants are projecting power via an app, to "clients" in the millions. Your data is aggregated. Faux-control about "signing up" is a scrap from their table.
Step 1:
Install XAMPP by going to https://www.apachefriends.org/download.html --
Download option "8.2.4 / PHP 8.2.4" or highest current version for your operating system. --
Note the directory where the files were installed. --
Inside the directory, open the "htdocs" folder. --
Create a folder here called "images" or whatever you like. --
Copy your images to this folder. --
Launch XAMPP, if not already launched.
Step 2:
Download this free image organizer from https://www.files.gallery --
When you click on download it will download a single file called "index.php".
Step 3:
Copy the index.php file you just downloaded to the images folder you created. --
Navigate in your browser to http://localhost/images/index.php (or replace images with whatever you named the images folder)
Don't recommend this. Bare metal install is very outdated nowadays. You surely want to use your server for multiple purposes down the line. You shouldn't install every app directly on your main OS - any misconfiguration or problem will bring down all other services, or make a machine-wide security issue. Also an attacker of one app will gain instant access to your whole server.
- Either use something simple and user friendly, like Synology with it's marketplace apps
- Or use virtualisation host OS that allows you to install multiple containers/virtual machines, each for your own application, like Proxmox
- Add containers via some container manager like Portainer or CapRover
Maybe these options seem like a bit more complicated first, but you will be very thankful for the invested time.
As a person who does sysadmin work as a day job, I can't disagree more. For something for a home server with very light load, VMs are extra heavy. For someone not knowing container networking and reverse proxies, things are complicated and more prone to misconfiguration.
Also, not all services are best suited for containers. JSWiki doesn't like to share the host, and wants its own subdomain. NextCloud from Container is a painful experience when it comes to add-ons from its built-in store. Installing it directly to OS is 1000x smoother.
The biggest exception is GitLab. When you install the OmniBus package, you can only use the server for GitLab, however, with that resource usage, you won't want to share it with another service, anyway.
When you give half the effort required to install a couple of services to bare metal, things work more efficiently, without any downtime, and any problems actually.
Any half-decent distro has the relevant packages in recent versions, good security support and constant updates. There's no reason to not install a Debian stable box with auto-updates enabled and servers downloaded from official repos.
I managed to run 5 services on an OrangePi Zero with 512MB RAM with no downtime and performance problems. It's possible and enjoyable.
