At this point, I’m not even going to bother trying to go on there anymore.
Reddit taught me to never trust a silicon valley, centralized, proprietary service on the internet with my data and/or content
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.
Or just use e2e encrypted services. They can be trustless and still useful.
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 be 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.
SELECT '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.
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.
Take a chill pill.
All I’m saying is whatever the service, be careful what you post online. We assume the people hosting fediverse services have a code of ethics or that they have our best interests or privacy at heart. Or even that they have the time and know how to protect our data.
But we should still consider the opposite and take the necessary precautions.
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.
It sounds like a weird statement because we have been trained to think the average “other” we will encounter in society as dangerous, but if you actually think about the statistics then yes absolutely it makes way more sense to trust a random person or handful of people to run your instance than a corporation. Publicly traded corporations are legally required to be assholes in the pursuit of profit, on the other hand most of the time randos usually aren’t assholes, though to be safe you should always be cautious as you say.
Hmmm, from a tech perspective there’s lots of VPS hosts that provide dashboards 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.
whoa there pardner
People who write “funny” error messages should be tied to a tree and have old circut boards thrown at their feet
If there’s one thing I learned working in IT it’s that devs actively half-ass their error messages, routinely misspell critical words you’re gonna grep for in logs, and never even consider having someone in Product read over customer-facing error messages like this. All they see is a Jira ticket that says “include the following verbiage in the VPN rejection message” that was typed up by a mostly plastered PM one afternoon after they downed 3 margaritas at “lunch” at the taqueria next to their office. And then they just copy and paste that shit into whatever bullshit HTML template took the least effort to find.
Error pages are a point where something bad happened, so the user is already in a bad mood. A shitty joke just makes the situation worse.
The only time I can remember enjoying novelty error messages is for 404 not found pages. It’s usually stuff like the Google T-Rex thing, or I’ve seen an astronaut floating in space, stuff like that.
Started? Been having that issue for months now. It only works on VPN if you’re logged on.
Certain VPN servers can go through it they haven’t implemented a block for it yet. AirVPN launched some new servers that worked for a bit, but Reddit blocked them a few weeks later.
They started also blocking OLD.reddit.com this week. I made a comment a couple months ago alluding to old.reddit.com still working even though they were blocking tor and known VPNs on www.reddit.com. I’m sure about 10,000 other people figured it out at the same time as me, since it was such a simple bypass, and I’m surprised it took this long to fix.
There are still at least 2 other unpatched ways.
old.reddit.com is the only Reddit website I use. I have every reddit link automatically redirect to that website as well. I haven’t been able to access old.reddit.com for months on most servers of 3 different VPNs I’ve used.
Can someone tell me how they would know if someone uses a VPN to access their site? I believe OpenVPN has a way to make traffic look like normal HTTPS traffic
It’s not about anti-censorship (making your VPN traffic look like regular traffic) it’s about the IP address at the end of the VPN connection. They have a list of known VPN provider IP ranges and block those. If you run a proxy server or VPN on a your own private VPS for example, then it won’t be detected.
These assholes forget that people need to use VPNs in many situations. All the bitch ass corporate folks that never have to use their computers in a coffee shop, etc. Fuck spez.
It goes much deeper than just coffee shops and other public wifi. There are people in oppressive countries that have to use VPNs to get around their country-wide bans of certain sites, such as anything that provides access to information. Reddit used to be a sanction for tons of information sharing. But now, with Reddit going public, they have to appeal to their shareholders, who probably have business or other deals in those oppressive countries. So, even if Reddit is simply trying to force users to be trackable, it still behooves the shareholders to make information and knowledge more difficult to access to certain people.
You can still use the site via VPN if you’re logged in. Which is really the entire point. They don’t actually care if you’re using a VPN; It’s just another method to force people to make an account, so the “active accounts” number looks good to shareholders.
Then Reddit’s notice should say that instead of scolding sbout VPNs. This problem is not simply with Reddit and a login, it is pervasive. Hell, even lemmy.world blocks vpn connections from making new comments, often.
Lemmy.world handles that particularly poorly, probably because they’re a nonprofit with a shoestring budget.
The most obvious improvement would be to accept comments when the account meets a certain age and activity threshold.
Then Reddit’s notice should say that instead of scolding sbout VPNs.
It-… Uhh… It does say that. It’s literally the second sentence in the body of the notice, and even has a link to create an account. Did you even read past the title?
And I just discovered this some weeks ago. The “woah there, pardner!” is so cringeworthy.
To me it sounds like a racist, homophobic Southern US citizen that likes to tote their guns and “defend” their property through the Castle doctrine because freedom (fuck yeah!).
Actually the perfect encapsulation of the brainrot on reddit.
You mean about the “Woah there , pardner?” or the overwhelming about of racism, bigotry, and homophobia?
I mean I’ve been to the South and I can confirm one of these two things.
