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What’s reddit? Is that like a new alternative to Lemmy? ;P
Reddit who?
how the hell did this get 51 upvotes
50 people clicked the up arrow below the comment.
While that is one possible reason, lets keep an open mind for any other possible ways that the comment gained votes.
Possibly a north korean bot willingly engaging in destabilyzing westeners fostering reddit circlejerk vapid culture.
Some people might have also clicked on a little bear.
A hexagonal bear
You’re almost there in down votes. Good job 🤣
It’s a good thing that free discussion doesn’t equate a mindless popularity contest. Oh wait, on Reddit it does, my bad …
I like how the original OP mention in passing that Reddit is bad for privacy.
Like, no shit? How can a privacy community be even remotedly healthy in such an environment?
It’s like having a club for how to avoid the police within a prison, regulated by the guards.
Browsing reddit while using a VPN is verboten.
Good grief I despise that smug, winking snoo with a effing fedora that goes along with the error page.
yeah, seems like they really don’t want site visits or something! oh well, its cooler here.
Untraceable visitors are worth nothing. From a cynical point of view, better off without them.
A lot of reddit’s most popular content is stuff like TrueOffMyChest from throwaway accounts. Robust privacy protection would result in more of those posts, and more traffic overall, but reddit doesn’t care about making the site work, they’ve dedicated themselves to milking the individual users for all they’re worth. It’s a bit like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Because look, now we’re all here, generating content on a competing platform
woah there pardner!
Better than me getting shadow banned from reddit for using one, I appealed back then
first time? I was banned from reddit entirely 8 times
Were you banned or shadow banned?
I was only shadow banned once, however never banned normally.
most of the times i got notified of the ban.
wut? I VPN all the time (for niche stuff Lemmy’s not there yet with).
I could’ve written a Tailscale App Connector to route it through the home connection, but I ended up blocking their domains outright and writing some CSS rules to hide Reddit from SearXNG results. It’s better than that annoying page.
Reddit was open source until 2017, and one of the founders was Aaron Schwartz. So it didn’t look like that for a long time.
I guess we all know it, since we are interested in Privacy and not clueless enough to be on Reddit (anymore?).
The degeneration from a “safe” place to what it is now is what makes it particoularly egregious a place to avoid for anybody serious about privacy…
2017 was 7 year ago, Aaron died 11 years ago. There are a lot younger users who can’t remember these things.
Let’s see a 20 years old university student was 13 when the source was closed down, I think it’s not easy to find a 13 years old who is familiar with such legal things.
Reddit basically has a completely new userbase. It’s not only by age of user. I don’t think people have really appreciated the rate of attrition has been near total. The old userbase of tech savvy STEM college degree holders have effectively abandoned the platform.
They’ve managed to sell the platform on a whole new set of users. So it looks like the site has kept on plugging along. But really reddit has successfully relaunched itself. Based on the idiosyncratic lingo I see most often. The bulk of users came from Facebook. They don’t know the traditional redditisms so they use vernacular from the platforms they’ve migrated from.
No but it’s much easier to find the 20 years old student interested in privacy that realyze right now that reddit is not open source…
in 2017 my biggest concerns were that whether i can play PS3 with broken hand or not (i could)
While I hate Reddit isn’t the fediverse basically horrible for privacy? It’s super easy to see everyone’s posts and IP addresses no? I thought anyone could basically download everything with very little effort and do whatever they want with it.
Yea, that is a good thing, nobody owns the info like this, it is public domain, as a place like this should be, in my opinion.
If you want private communities, I think matrix spaces are a great independent solution.
Yep. Still going in a better direction than Reddit though.
better direction for what?
Humans
If you only talk about privacy on already private platforms, it will become a circlejerk in no time. You need to tell people who have no interest/experience in online privacy about it so you can further the cause. This is why the FSF is on Twitter/X.
I guess having something in there is good but it’s inherently an issue when the topic at hand is acting outside survelliance.
Let’s say, for example, things escalate and reddit get fully weaponized for the benefit of one side, and they start pushing for known compromised VPNs. How can you fight that if pepole got into the habit of trusting such platform?
You tell them Reddit is not trustworthy and they should move out, of course. I am not denying that. I am saying the r/privacy community should not be dead because Reddit is a popular platform whether you like it or not, and people need to be informed about their right to privacy even on a known hostile platform.
We can agree to agree.
OP is the original OP. Probably. Reddit poster’s name is the same as the Lemmy poster’s name.
My guess is, the people who care didn’t stick around. As s result, quality went down.
Nerdy communities always seem to attract some very opinionated people, which is a turn off for people just trying to do better.
As an older hobbyist, exactly.
I’m as guilty as anyone, but I promise I’m trying to be better.
I’m trying to be better.
Unlike those dang noobs
I think we’re all guilty of that regardless of the subject
I will go one step further and say 1. most strong opinions are not based on deep knowledge, and 2. a lot of this drama is legitimate mental illness… a niche of a niche that by design is run by extremely paranoid people, often aren’t all there in the head, or you could say they have simply crossed over the fine line of genius.
Tbh I am done with reddit as a whole, back then a lot of mods were power tripping, but now most of them are. You can’t say anything, do anything, it would be better for them if no one would even visit their communities.
This is completely unsurprising tbh. A lot of the old mods were enthusiasts who grew a community from scratch due to their love for the subject. In the reddit API shutdown, a lot of those mods left in disgust, or were replaced by the reddit admins, or were driven off by the leftover toxic userbase calling them “entitled jannies” or whatever. A lot of the mods who took over their place were just power-hungry users who were chomping at the bit to get the chance to run a big community as their personal fiefdom because they were too toxic to grow one themselves.
This is the inevitable culmination of these events.
Anyway, welcome to lemmy. We become more powerful from every user who writes off reddit forever.
PS: if you see power-trippin’ behaviour around these parts, you can always post about it in !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
I use a repost bot to keep up with the Monero reddit but most of the time I find that I’m not interested enough to actually click the link to go to the original post on reddit and so most of the time I just stay here. I deleted my account during the API issues back in June of 2023 and have not had an account since then and do not plan on going back as I really enjoy it here.
I don’t even think you need even a bot for that. Just grab the relevant RSS
It’s not my bot. It’s a bot somebody else created and I just use it.
To be fair there’s lots of power-tripping mods on lemmy as well, often using their colorful interpretations of subjective rules/terms to suppress opinions they don’t like.
Yeah, that sounds right. Well at least I am happy that I was checking lemmy year ago and now I decided to finally try it.
Also thanks for advice :D
It was a terrible sub for years much before the apicalypse. It was full of apple fanboys who believed every marketing bullshit.
Apple fanboys pollute privacy comms on this side of social media too, tbh :/
Wait, what’s wrong with Proton Mail?
They gave meta information like IP to the government in Switzerland, where they are based, after the government forced them to with a court order. Not the encrypted mail, mind you, because they can’t do that, just the additional information they have on a user like email and IP.
Because of that, a lot of redditers on r/privacy think they spy on their users for the US government. It’s a stretch, yes, but you have to remember they take turns using the one brain they collectively have.
Not the encrypted mail, mind you, because they can’t do that
Just want to point out for anyone new that ProtonMail does not use E2EE for email headers. That means they CAN access your subject lines, to/from fields, and other email headers. That means they CAN be forced to hand it over to the government.
Source: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained
Subject lines and recipient/sender email addresses are encrypted but not end-to-end encrypted.
Personally I am disappointed in a lot of Proton’s wording about this. They frequently promise they can’t access “your data” and “your messages” when they do, in fact, store potentially sensitive data in a format they CAN access.
It’s email, that’s the best you can get with email, if you want to have more privacy, DON’T USE EMAIL
This is good advice, because email is very difficult to make reliably private. However, it’s not the best you can get. Tutanota, for example, stores headers with E2EE, and still has a search function.
The goal should be to make it as private as it can realistically be. Ideally, any cloud service you use should only store end-to-end encrypted data.
I’m not trying to shit on Proton — it’s a huge step up from the popular mainstream email services, and the inclusion of cloud storage makes it a much easier transition than going piecemeal with 2-5 different services.
A bit more context is important here. They aren’t E2EE, but they are stored encrypted. In the case of the person whose meta information was turned over, ProtonMail wasn’t forced to hand over the information right away, they were forced to collect it the next time that person accessed and used their email. That tells us that they didn’t store the information beforehand and could not access it without preparing to intercept it the next time their service was used.
Ultimately, though, if something like that’s a dealbreaker, it’s likely you’re doing something that would benefit from a more secure way of communicating than email.
Yeah I agree, sounds a bit excessive. If that’s correct, it doesn’t sound like they’re reading your data and at the end of the day they have to comply with things like warrants. Thanks for the clarification.
It is all also very clearly stated in the information they must collect in order to provide their service. There should’ve been no surprises here, as you must assume that scenarios like these will happen eventually.
If all they have on you is your optional backup email and your IP, I think they’re doing pretty well in the no data-collecting part?
Well, you don’t even need to provide an email or phone number when you sign up, so if you access the site via their onion address every time, they would have no information on you at all.
I guess the issue here is overselling the safety of the service. Wouldn’t rely on them encrypting the mail for you, for example. It’s probably fine if you treat it just like you would any other email service - assuming you’re fine with being unable to use a mail client at all on the free plan and using it in a weird roundabout way on the paid plans.
the issue is that they can’t defy the law without shutting down and going into jail. proton has given the tool the activist would have needed to protect themselves: the service has an official onion site, which would have made IP collection impossible, and they could have just said they can’t know it
Yes, that was exactly my point. You would not treat any mail service like they would cover you during your unprotected use, and Proton is not an exception. So I don’t understand why people are taking issue with them cooperating with LE - but I take issue with some other qualities.
So I don’t understand why people are taking issue with them cooperating with LE
some believe they (proton) are invincible and can do whatever they want. maybe because they think that’s what swiss privacy and swiss laws mean
But… basically every email provider or hosting service is legally obliged to give the information they collect to the government. It’s not like this is exclusive to Proton in any way whatsoever. If anything, subpoenas are evidence Proton tell the truth and do at least stop themselves from having most of the important data so they can’t give it away.
It’s proprietary.
I don’t think OP was trying to say Proton Mail is bad or insecure. Rather the opposite.
Privacy wise? Probably nothing. The company engages in shitty behavior, though, and will try to upsell you even if you’re a paying costumer. I switched to Tuta because of that, and then Tuta started doing all the same bs…
I would also like to know, lol.
What’s the background here? Do they censor stuff?
urtbrubtturbrtbu
Mention VPNs are forbidden due to spam and stuff, GrapheneOS mention forbidden because of drama
Defeats the whole purpose of the subreddit, it’s like saying you’re not allowed to talk about yellow in a community about colours…
Now that’s a rule I can get behind.
Community about colours?
More like a community about the color orange and it’s related hues.
Whats the story on GrapheneOS drama?
At least one of the devs is an arrogant, condescending prick. Remember Nick the Computer Guy from SNL? He’s like 3 times worse than that. I’ve experienced it first hand - as in his second reply to me was to blame me: “you’re doing it wrong”. He’s exactly like some people I worked with 30 years ago. Smh.
There’s far more than that, though. In general, the Graphene team says everyone else is wrong. Classic idealist attitude.
I run DivestOS now because of that interaction, I will never use Graphene. That dev can go fuck himself with a pineapple - had enough of his kind of childishness decades ago.
Having had a disagreement with Miguel De Icaza that boiled down to him saying “Well I have these books on my shelf so I’m right” (narrator: he wasn’t right, it was hilarious later).
I will never, ever touch Gnome. I get it.
High level summary: A bunch of nerds got into a slapfight about who’s project is less secure, or who’s project is run by the feds. Some guys got doxxed or swatted, a few stepped away from their projects and left social media, and that’s about where we are today. It’s largely a bunch of clout-chasing nonsense.
Only reason I’d recommend signal to anyone is that its one of the few encrypted apps that doesnt have awful onboarding. A boomer can figure it out.
What do you recommend?
If Signal was not simple, my family and friends would likely use Telegram or WhatsApp. Even switching to Signal required a number of (general) newspaper articles criticising the status quo. It’s likely not optimal, but okayish and sharing opinions and holiday impressions feels a bit better.
Switching a service is a slow, difficult process and many contacts will not follow, given they would abandon other contacts among friends, family, parents at school, sports teams, … (now, I’m here, using 4+ solutions).
If training or even curiosity for the technical process is required, very few people will follow. If it takes me (with strong IT background) more than 30 minutes to understand/implement, I may have a decent private solution, but I will feel quite lonely soon.
the other decent options are matrix and simplex chat, and mayyyybe session. matrix seems to have the most users and kick to it right now. out of those options. but yeah youre not gonna get the average tech illiterate person to get on a more complicated alternative to discord, essentially
Oh I remember r/privacy, this comment is spot on. You expect something like the Linux communities where it is okay what ever you prefer. But privacy-nerds sometimes goes the spying government/tech-firms rabbit-hole to deep.
Can’t Linux communities be just as bad? There’s constant bickering over systemd, snaps, canonical, red hat.
Yeah, but at least here on lemmy a lot of that doesn’t seem to be very serious and everyone is mostly ok with whatever you use. Don’t know how it was on reddit.
I also got DMs asking why it’s removed or if I got banned, + someone asking and saying in topic it’s the 3rd in short time.
We love lemmy ❤️
i can agree on a few stuff, and can’t on some others. I just choose the most private options aviable that still serve the purpose i use them for. Like if you can find something on Google Play, Aurora, F-droid, obviously, it is better to download from f-droid, but if you have a bit more time, it is even better to download from source or even compile it yourself. But it always upsets me when people ask for privacy tips when using ios or windows, like are you joking or what? ditch those lol. And obviously, as a gamer, i wouldn’t use purist linux oses, like PureOS, because it can have serious issues with games. But i won’t buy nvidia if i want to game on linux, when i can get amd with open-source drivers on distros like Garuda. So i think a reasonable privacy can’t hurt anyone, but moving on just the next little step or going into the extremes are both not good ideas
I can’t recommend downloading from sources to normal people, and the problem is no, one step after step is better, as you can’t have a perfect solution for privacy btw, but moving from one service to one service lets say in one day, week or maybe even month is not realistic. Its like recommending a password manager, great, but then saying theres immediat need to change all password… Like, technically true, but realisticly, bank and mail firsts, then step by step some passwords, without forgeting new accounts should have now strong passwords.
As I said, ie my girlfriend knowing Im interested into privacy tell me that she just installed and created a protonmail account and she used Drive a bit, if I just say thats useless because there need compartimentalization and Proton gave IP to police, thats fckd up
The most private, the most secure option isn’t for everyone, first to threat model, second to personnal daily life
A person interested can still have Gafam apps, for some needs, required, but can limit the settings.
If you are a gamer, you mostly still need Windows computer (Linux got better and better, depends on games tho), then you can choose to say fck, or you can use it with limiting the stuff you can (turning off maximum settings you can, OsU10, etc.). Thats the same with iOS… Most people wont buy right now a new phone because of privacy, but maybe the next in few months or in 2 years ; doesnt mean during this period you can’t choose apps to use, turning off iOS features, etc…
For some projects I needed TikTok, I wrote myself a guide, to use it as anonymous as possible, to TikTok and to people, instead of using it raw, defaults
for gaming, i will buy very capable hardware. ryzen 7 7th or ryzen 9 7th series cpu, 32gb 6000mhz ddr5 ram, 3000mb/s SSDs, rx 7800 xt. On proton db, these devices tend to have good scores. Also i don’t play with ANY competitive games at all, so don’t have to worry about anticheat. I should be fine then, right? Without dualbooting, that complicates things to an unnecessary degree
It is always risky to do stuff raw…
Not like the communities here are any different …
Literally just read Brave sucks above lol
I’ve gotten downvote bombed for suggesting Brave as a Chrome replacement since they have Ublock filters built in. Sure you need to disable a few settings after a fresh install, but at least they let you. Idgaf about what their ceo did 15 yeard ago etc. – I’m not giving them money, I’m using a product which is familiar with what I used before, and has good ad blocking built in.
@red @tobogganablaze https://brave.com/blog/intro-to-brave-ads/ The ad blocker is there to give them the opportunity to pitch their own ad network.
And can be happily ignored. I’ve seen that thing just twice, once on my desktop and once on Android.
And it’s opt in, not opt out.
My point still stands: it’s a good drop in replacement for Google Chrome.
It’s not the best, but it’s better than staying with Google - a lot of people want a familiar hassle free replacement, and in that regard I don’t know what else to recommend
Unsurprising behavior from a community where the coolest person is the one who can put on the biggest tin foil hat. I appreciate the privacy community here but I think the concept itself leads to users decrying anything as insecure just because it makes them feel more knowledgeable.
