Mate, I was simply extending an analogy you introduced. I neither know (nor care) what the presence of a McDonalds does or doesn’t do so don’t Sagan me. Nor am I claiming mainstream social media is all arseholes. What I’m saying is that mainstream social media most certainly has the ability and propensity to make people into arseholes due to constant enshittification - part of which is the influencer phenomenon in my opinion and the need for growth at all costs.

I most definitely have reached out to lots of good people on the fediverse and had lots of great exchanges that follow both professional and ‘hobby’ based interests I have.

But here’s the thing - you want growth? OK. I also have no issue with growth. But the best sort of growth in my experience comes organically. It happens at its own pace. The minute you start prodding it along with managed algorithms and all the other stuff mainstream social media now has you end up with an extended hate room. I don’t miss Reddit or Xitter at all. I genuinely mean that. No more ‘suggestions’ of people to follow, no more manufactured outrage getting pushed to my feed, no more clickbait. Instead what I have now is a curated feed across multiple different types of experiences that I spent some time getting how I want them and dipping in and out of when I want to.

You’re using words like ‘ambition’ and ‘irrelevant’ like the Fediverse is some sort of corporate entity. It’s not - that’s a point very much in its favour in the opinion of quite a lot of people on it. Contrary to your opinion that no one cares, lots do. What some of us don’t care about is catering to a set of people who are paid to express opinions and who, it seems to me, over a period of time end up becoming Andrew Tate or Russel Brand.

There’s no McDonalds in the town I currently live in, which is 20 minutes away from one of the largest cities in the country. It might come as a massive shock to you but I - and I think the majority of people - can survive just fine without a Mickey D’s. Not having one doesn’t make a place desolate, it makes it healthier. And if someone really wants a Big Mac, they can go and get one from elsewhere.

Do you see what I’m saying? This isn’t the same place as that - it’s quite nice to have a place online that still isn’t. And for those that do want that, they can still spend time there if they chose to.

Strangely comforting for something I’m sure you thought was a snappy comeback,

I genuinely don’t care about influencers. Like, at all.

Maybe they should stop caring about visibility and engagement and concentrate on participating in, building and y’know enjoying a community?

I can vouch for whisper.cpp . It’s not 100% perfect but it’s good enough to transcribe a half hour podcast with numerous speakers and which requires pretty minimal fixing afterwards.

It is worth noting though, that Proton doesn’t allow you to use certain domains for recovery addresses. Admittedly this was awhile ago and maybe things have changed there but when I first joined Proton they wouldn’t allow me to set a duck.com or simplelogin.com or addy.io address as a recovery email.

Obviously using an apple ID is stupid but Proton could make more of an effort too.

That’s true, there’s always going to have to be some trust, but a provider that takes the time and expense to invest in a privacy audit or defend their clients by not logging and establishing that in court certainly indicates they’re worth having that trust in.

Do ISP’s monitor or sell or pass on your data? Yes.

Do VPN’s? Depends on the VPN. Find one that doesn’t and can back that up with 3rd party audits and legal encounters.

So can a good VPN protect your privacy? No, not by themselves. A VPN is part of an overall toolkit to be as private as you personally would like to be. It can help protect your privacy, that’s all.

It’s really that simple.

I understand that, but surely the Admin who took the action isn’t in a different timezone form themselves? What was stopping them immediately posting just before or just after taking the action?

Whilst I completely understand why you, as private individuals with limited income and not a huge org that has high priced legal teams on call, have made this decision (I think people forget that it costs money just to defend yourself in court, irrespective of how accurate or legal the charges might be), this is about the 3rd or 4th time that the Admin team have communicated and taken action very, very poorly.

It’s really not a difficult thing to do. A post such as this either before or immediately after taking such important actions. I realise you’re all busy people with real life stuff to do too but surely you tell new Admin’s when they’re onboarded that momentous decisions that affect a lot of people must be communicated to the members immediately?

US to UK English and vice-versa.

Nope, no issues :) Debian is (as you know) pretty rock solid and Mint is too. It’s pretty much like having a system as reliable as Ubuntu but with none of the Canonical bullshit.

Depends on what level of privacy you want. I’m using Linux Mint Debian Edition with GNOME installed on it and it hits the sweet spot between privacy respecting and Mint’s ease of use.

That’s a security audit, looking at its vulnerability to attack.

Deciding to trust a provider - any provider - isn’t just any one thing. So, the most basic step to me is all the relevant code being open source. The next step is getting their infrastructure audited. The step after that is seeing what happens if they get court ordered to provide data.

They do none of that and I’m just too cynical to accept ‘trust me bro’ as a convincing sales tactic.

Because claiming they don’t is not the same as being able to verify they don’t by making their code open source.

It’s ridiculously expensive. It’s not private if you have to link your searches to a paid account and none of those payment providers are private. They don’t seem to have open sourced any of their key functionality, meaning you have to trust them to not be collecting your activity data.

I spent a long time getting rid of software and using services that I either no longer trusted or was unable to make an informed choice due to their lack of open source code and I’m not going to take a retrograde step now. And that’s without the issue with their choice (a continued choice I believe) to use Brave results, a company I’m personally not prepared to support.

I realise that as individuals without the huge resources of a business your options are limited. I also have a lot of sympathy with the admins and mods being exposed to that shit. I don’t know what the answer is but I don’t think blanket silencing all users who care about their privacy is a solution.

I think they probably did it at first as its quick and easy to set up. And they did strongly recommend anyone mailing them encrypted the emails. I would also assume it was always the plan to self host them but it was the least important part of the whole system so they left it until last to address.