Not all notifications go through FCM but all push notifications do as far as I’m aware - which is what the previous comment and the post title are talking about.

It is, in fact, worrying for privacy implications on the one hand and a real monopolizing factor on the other since if you wish to deliver an app which needs to implement such notifications you’re using Google’s service or constantly drain the user’s battery.

There’s UnifiedPush which tries to provide an open alternative but so far unfortunately still sees very little adoption.

That is a little of how I use it too - I have all podcasts set to download automatically globally (set it up to 25 episodes at the same time) and put them in my queue so I always have exactly 25 episodes to listen to in any order there each day.

Then there are 2 daily podcasts that I do not let automatically download (but automatically refresh, and I love that the app delineates between the two), however one regularly produces longer episodes including a lot of the shorter ones that I do let it automatically download. Huh, I never realized how advanced the setup actually is. Though I do remember the actual ‘setting up’ being relatively painless after getting to grips with the global/per-podcast difference.

Also, fwiw I have the synchronization set up using one of the self-hosted options instead of the default gpodder service - which is often down intermittently - and it works well enough, even if a bit slow every now and again.

Auto-downloads work wonderfully here and can even be set per-podcast which is such a nice feature.

Not saying this to denigrate your experience but to perhaps soften the ‘is horrific’ notion into somewhat more of a ‘does not work for you’ one. Otherwise, I suppose Pocket Casts is also open source nowadays - or has always been and I did not notice? But that was a reasonably good alternative for me as well before I switched to AntennaPod.

I realize this isn’t your point but I feel the need to point out that skinheads are not nazis - it is unfortunately a very well working project of cultural appropriation by the racists.

In the scene racist skinheads are mostly referred to as boneheads, a term which I think makes much more sense.

It’s interesting that people are surprised at these seatwarmers when they’ve only been offering indicators as aftermarket upgrades for decades and yet no BMW owner chose to buy them.

They also automatically inserted affiliate links into your browser bar/ search results until it was discovered and the response was a nipple-touching ‘sorry’.

Only found this article on binance on the quick but iirc it affected a couple other pages as well.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology

Yes tenacity is a community fork that happened during the hubbub with the musescore takeover and telemetry additions and doesn’t have any of it.

It also has a couple of quality-of-life additions and a few new features but nothing specifically different as of yet. Mostly, it’s a good community-lead fork that has some momentum behind it - since it also unifies the developers behind 2-3 protest forks that happened at the same time and I think that’s generally (if not a safe bet) a good thing to support.