LemmyReddit started blocking VPN users on old.reddit.com
乇ㄥ乇¢ㄒ尺ㄖCould have learned that a long time ago. Everybody learns it somehow from some greedy company. Luckily you’ve learned it now.
Same.
I’m switching everthing over to federated, self-hosted, decentralized, open source…
It’s a brave new old school world!
Well you shouldn’t trust a public, decentralized, open source personally hosted service either.
I don’t really know who’s hosting the Lemmy or other fediverse services I use and what access they have to the data that we post on there.
Basically, you shouldn’t trust any online service with your data and your posts.
Off the grid it is, then
Or just use e2e encrypted services. They can be trustless and still useful.
Depends on how they’re implemented. Signal and WhatsApp are e2e encrypted, but they track your phone number, your contacts and IP address. Maybe even metadata
Of course you shouldn’t but there is a categorical difference between the risk of a corporation exploiting you because of a power imbalance (you want to use Reddit, there aren’t alternatives in this hypothetical scenario) and the rando running your fediverse instance abandoning the project or being weird about your data.
The second category can definitely be problematic, but it just isn’t the same level of awfulness and systematic exploitation that corporations wield every day to extract a profit.
What’s to stop a data broker from running an instance?
Sure it could happen, but I don’t understand what relevance that has when you compare it to the fact that you KNOW without a shadow of a doubt corporations are going to sell your data to the maximal amount they can, even if it is illegal.
Besides this isn’t about our data being sold or not being sold really (our data will be mined and sold so long as it is publicly available on social networks in a certain sense), it is about who has the power and who doesn’t. Does a single corporation run by a billionaire fascist-baby or is it run by an imperfect constellation of developers, instance maintainers and moderators?
Jo MiranEh. I went the other route. I am very noisy online. I post and comment all over the place but I treat all of that as what it is, content I have given away freely and publicly. Now, when I need to do something privately, you are going to need serious mojo to he able to dig it out. Plus, who would assume that I do certain things privately when almost everything I do is out in the open.
tetris11SELECT 'ipaddress', 'username' FROM tables
WHERE (username.normalize() == "jomiran"
OR post.links CONTAIN "jomiran")
FILTER content IN _blacklist_keywords;
Or some such. Data is easy to mine if you have a target. It’s finding unknown targets that is hard.
Exactly. Do a search for my username and get flooded with shitposts. IP? MAC? Same, plus some porn watching and way too much YouTube. Everything I want to keep private is done with as many degrees of separation as possible.
IP? MAC? Same
Unique fingerprint? Most likely the same with your “private” stuff.
I use disposable hardware (one time use) and unique, pre-configured remote access points from third party locations for my work. In other words, many little headless Raspberry Pis everywhere.
delirious_owlI have 10 Facebook accounts, a few with my real name and about 20 google accounts.
The real accounts that I use are created and destroyed frequently.
DominusOfMegadeusYou…you realize you just posted right?
Just because you shouldn’t trust them doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to interact with them. It just means you need to be careful.
CrackhappyWhat about a whiteboard?
You could message the instance admin on matrix and get to know them…
You can trust that the service will persist. The fediverse is practically speaking unkillable since no one group holds all the strings. The trade off is that any data you post is shared freely with all. At least it’s clear from the start and no one is profiting off of it. Unlike Reddit, you know exactly what’s going on as soon as you sign up.
UltragigagiganticTrue, I am safeties alone in my dank basement
Internet 101 if you want control, self host.
Hmmm, from a tech perspective there’s lots of VPS hosts that provide dashboards able to deploy a CMS in one click (Ghost, WordPress, etc.), in that way it’s never been easier to get started. The hard part though is gaining visibility and publishing enough content to give people a reason to visit.
To each their own, that can be a benefit but youll still need to buy hardware and maybe rent rack space (if you need bandwidth).
My tiny slice of the web hosts a private image gallery for my family to upload and share photos. Going into it I wasn’t really interested in administering yet another server. Instead I threw $6 at a VPS and had a publicly accessible, user friendly site with backups up and running in about 15 minutes… and I haven’t had to think about it again since. That monthly sub is worth it for reclaiming my time.
The currency situation makes sense and I apologize-- I realize now I had a very western-centric perspective while writing my thoughts. I can efinitely understand hosting on your own hardware as the opportunity cost in that situation is hugely different. I think the next best option is a good server OS and the ghost docker container but you are right it is not as straight forward or easy. Best of luck friend, trust documentation not youtubers :)