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[–] 12 points 8 months ago (3 children)

great! hopefully there is room for others to start to grow

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    That's be nice, but let's be realistic, everyone is signed in, and no one will even notice. This is probably to fight scraping.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    And let’s be realistic: if they’re not signed in - or if they even don’t have a Google account (because they live on the moon), then they’re just gonna follow the instructions and do what they’re told.

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  • [–] 24 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Wow it's so much cleaner. And we can just turn this on all the time?

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Are they trying to fight scrapers?

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Fight scrapers, provide more targeted advertising, use this as a beginning to get people to make an account.

    Google doesn't have an incentive to keep this information open without an account but several incentives to put it behind an account wall.

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago

    Fuck google.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    So they really just removed the only features that made their propietary service better than the foss ones? I can check public transit with the official app, and do everything else thats navigation related with OSM. Insane move

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago

    ActivityPub review system? I don't want to figure out how to make that right now. Somebody else?

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    You also can't view users' 3D photos either :c

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (4 children)
  • [+] [S] 25 points 8 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Unfortunately so.

    As much as I don't want to use any Google services, Maps is unfortunately not easily replaced, because it all comes down to user-submitted content.

    If you want to look up a restaurant and see photos of the venue and the food, Maps is where that content is.

    Google absolutely know how valuable this is and how much leverage they can get with it by the manner they've implemented the change.

    I use FOSS wherever I can, but we don't get to choose where other members of the public put their content. Most of the time I can choose to opt out. I consciously don't have Facebook or Insta for example, which leaves me at a disadvantage at times because an increasing number of businesses think it's fine for their only web presence to be a Facebook page - with no actual website of their own.

    And it's in those times especially I find myself being pushed to Google maps just to find a user-submitted picture of the menu so I can even see what they've got.

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago

    I agree that CoMaps and similar apps don't have the feature set that signed-out Google Maps users are losing in this move by Google, so it's not totally relevant.

    I don't agree with just calling CoMaps a navigation app in the sense of "how do I get to Point B", though. In well-mapped areas it has business information including specifics about the shop/restaurant, opening hours, accessibility, payment methods, etc. It has points of interest that give information about a location's history and culture, as well as ancillary information from Wikipedia/WikiData. It has information about green spaces, vehicles and bicycle parking, waterways, sports clubs and tracks/pistes, toilets and other public services, benches, water points, and a bunch more.

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago*

    WV still working for me?

    Yet another locked down platform trying to fight the infinite network of bots that is AI scrapers.

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  • [–] -3 points 8 months ago