Dan Fixes Coin-OpsMar 12

Starting to understand why folk block Brave users.

Was chatting on the Island about the slopbot attack, mentioned and linked to a great article by a Fedi person about mitigating slopbots, Brave Dude says yo is this article gibberish for anyone else, I say are you using Brave, he says yeah, I say yeah that'll be the problem and link him to https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/ 'cause I know that this particular Fedi person blocks Brave browser by default.

Dude then proceeds to try to argue with ME about how you can turn off the scams and yeah the CEO is bad but everybody is bad, and I'm like... dude that's not my website, I don't know why you're telling me this. Pop firefox or something on there if you wanna read it, otherwise don't worry about it 'cause I'm too lazy to bother blocking brave on my own site.

But, like, I've very definitely noticed that with other software, when folk go "Yo check this out, these are the horrifying reasons why I don't use it / it's a big scam," most people go "Oh shit what're you using instead gimme recs," but brave bros will pour out an essay about why the scams don't matter because it's just such a good browser (chrome with a hat on)

Stop using Brave Browser

Seriously.

The Spacebar
Show threadDan Fixes Coin-OpsMar 12

So like, I don't personally block brave mostly out of laziness but also out of a sense of... most people don't know it's bad because most people don't really know shit about fuck

And I don't even mean that in a bad way, I'm not saying oh folks are ignorant, I mean I guess probably some are, whatever, but THE WORLD IS SO ENORMOUSLY FULL OF THINGS and 99.9999999% of those things will escape the attention of anyone who doesn't rely on those things in their day to day normal life

Like I come on here and I see stuff like, everybody knows substack is a nazi bar, everybody knows brave is crypto scams and fraud and homophobia, everybody knows this and that

nobody knows

everybody HERE knows, sure, but outside of the Here where something daft like three-quarters of people run their own website and nearly half use linux and we're basically THOROUGHLY UNREPRESENTATIVE OF BROADER SOCIETY, a bunch of edge cases writhing in a bag, Nestle are still in business, and d'you think everybody who buys a Crunch bar does it with the full knowledge of two million starved-to-death babies, it is Not Normal To Know That

and yeah people "should" know, but they don't, so we can't go around assuming that the people who use a thing are weighing their options and making an informed choice to go "Yes, I want the cryptocurrency homophobe scam browser, that's definitely what I want" rather than "This lets me block ads."

Of course there are edge cases like The Guy Discussed Above but I think those are genuinely, like, vocal minority. So yeah if I do end up doing something on my websites that targets Brave specifically then it's gonna be, like, a "Hey change your browser because of these reasons" banner or something rather than a total block/redirect, because most people genuinely don't know and here on fedi we REALLY overestimate how much stuff people actually know

Show threadTiny Toy DragonMar 12
@ifixcoinops I used to use brave as a chrome alternative for when i needed chromium stuff until i found out what the CEO was about

And then i found out about vivaldi, which is (sadly) chromium based, but it's run by one of the OG Opera folks and is... quiet?

Like, it gets development, but so far the team has been vocally against shoving LLMs into the browser ( https://vivaldi.com/blog/a-i-browsers-the-price-of-admission-is-too-high/ ) has a inbuilt adblocker, and no crypto. I think there's a VPN that i saw offered at one point but I dismissed it months ago and I can't find it easily now?

But it's also been super nice for wrangling my three billion tabs, the session manager has been nice, the mobile app has been consistent, and so far ive not heard of any dramas about the people running it.

It also seems to go under the radar of many but ive been quite enjoying it.

(tho if anyone knows of any problems PLEASE do let me know >.< )
“A.I.” browsers: the price of admission is too high | Vivaldi Browser

It’s a cliché that “data is the new oil” that will power the next industrial revolution. Where does the data that powers Artificial Intelligence come from? And if data is the fuel for AI…

Vivaldi Browser
Show thread🍋 Superball ☀️Mar 13

@toydragon I’m also on Vivaldi and am happy with it so far, given a lack of any other semi-reasonable options . . . ? 👀🤷🏻‍♀️

@ifixcoinops

Show threadshomMar 13
@superball I've been very happy with Zen browser, which is based on Firefox and it's community driven (they've been around a couple years and really on it with updates) and not doing horrific corporate shit. I also use Vivaldi for some things, glad they're around and have taken a browser is for browsing stance, same as Zen.
@toydragon @ifixcoinops
Zen Browser

Beautifully designed, privacy-focused, and packed with features.

Show thread🍋 Superball ☀️Mar 13

@shom Interesting. . . . Looks like the only search-engine choices are Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing, though . . . ? I like Maapl.

@toydragon @ifixcoinops

Show threadTiny Toy DragonMar 13
@superball @ifixcoinops @shom if only there was some way to add more search engines to the list.
Show threadshomMar 13

Hey @toydragon you're right, additional (any) search engines can be added and thanks for providing a screenshot. Your actions were very kind and helpful, thank you, I hope we can also help @superball with kind words.

@superball I'm not familiar with that search and couldn't find it, but would be happy to help you set it up.

@ifixcoinops

Show threadDan Fixes Coin-OpsMar 13
@shom @toydragon @superball related, I've been fiddling around with yunohost on a cheap (like €3ish/month) Hetzner VPS and one of the thingies I installed was a metasearch engine called SearXNG, and it's... actually surprisingly nice!
Show threadTiny Toy DragonMar 13
@ifixcoinops @shom @superball searxng is great stuff, i need to get a working instance of that up and running again.
Show threadDan Fixes Coin-Ops
@toydragon @superball @shom I'd last tried it a few years ago and at the time it honestly wasn't great, but I figured eh, it's been a little bit, let's give it another try, and I'm glad I did :)
Mar 13 at 5:48pmWeb