Yes, but at least here I can choose an instance in a privacy friendly jurisdiction or one that is small enough, including a self-hosted one. It’s not a perfect shield, but federation helps a lot with digital independence (which is why it’s prominent in pre-internet theories of how to make anarchy work without collapsing into warlordism).

Spoiler alert, both British officials and EU officials are openly considering to slap an age restriction on VPN software, too. Would turn into a weird Catch-22, where you need a non-restricted VPN to download a non-restricted VPN, like in China right now.

Oh, I absolutely am blaming the politicians behind this (and the lobby groups behind them). The only strictly wrong thing Reddit does is how it implements that law, i.e., using third-party age verification that happens to also use your data to profile you and that has been shown to be insecure (Further Reading links in my post).

Agreed. Lemmy, while being very new, mimics features of ye olden times. Newsgroup era and all… But Reddit kinda started that way and then, as all good things, slowly enshittified. It seemed to resist enshittification longer than most sites. At least that was my impression. But good things can’t last. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, after all, I guess.

Here I am, not enough hands for all the cookies and kitties. Haven’t used Reddit in months and perfectly happy without it. Still sharing my sadness about seeing “the old internet” slip further and further down that slope.

There is LibreLynx Lite on F-Droid, but it is very bare bones. Do not recommend, especially while IronFox exists.

Rarely. I would say that about 19/20 pages work as expected. I do keep a manually hardened Firefox install on my device for the rare site that I do want to visit but that doesn’t load in IronFox for some reason. In my experience, VPN breaks the internet more than IronFox does. And I still want to use VPN.

You could say that it was showing a reflection of the sky.

The EU will need to form a proper federal state or be torn apart in the persistent attacks of the other major world powers that actively try to prevent just that unification.

We’re moving to a world where the law requires you to be profiled in order to participate.

Chilling!

Another sad demonstration that Signal, while much preferable over non-encrypted messages, still hard-links your social graph to your phone number, which is often tied to your identity.

5 lines in and it reads like slop.

Adding my personal notes on search engines here for anyone’s interest. I personally use Qwant on Desktop and DuckDuckGo on mobile. I like Qwant because they are at least working on their own index and are EU-based. On the other hand, DuckDuckGo is faster and has a more comprehensive privacy policy. I’m really trying to use Mojeek on mobile but the search results are much worse than DuckDuckGo and Qwant in my repeated experience.

Useful background:

• https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/technical/blur-pixelation-censorship-false-security/
• https://undercodetesting.com/the-vulnerability-of-pixelation-as-a-privacy-measure/

I believe they are just running some sort of network detection. I also got this message yesterday, but when I switched servers in my VPN it went away. Sad to see reddit go down this path. But that’s why I’m here.

Spoilsport :P

Erm… OP, you know that blurring is not destructive, right?

Could one integrate this with apps like NextTube or PipePipe? I.e., When I search for a video on those apps, they search the torrent index first, then search Frama Tube / PeerTube second, then search YouTube-proper last. While I’m streaming a video from any of these sources, I am then also downloading and seeding it to the torrent network and I keep seeding the last videos I watched on a rolling basis until an allocated memory space on my disk is full and the oldest or least requested video in that local buffer is deleted to make space for new; while I’m on Wifi to save mobile data? I think providing such seamless integration is the best way to get this space densely populated enough to be useful.

I have not. To be perfectly honest, I don’t really understand how that would even work. Can you elaborate? At home, I run a local model with a Kobold CCP backbone to localhost. The physical network is a private Wifi, though the computer is running VPN and I haven’t given much thought about what that means for the AI via localhost. At work, I can thankfully use a responsibly managed AI (company servers, very strong and externally audited data privacy standard with zero on-server data retention) for coding.

I’m doing my part 😁