I pay Bitwarden the tenner a year as I have no reason to distrust them and they’re definitely providing a more reliable, securer service than I can self-host.
I also do an encrypted export once per week and store that export to an encrypted cloud based service and an encrypted USB stick. Takes 2 minutes.
Bandcamp is still OK for me and I listen to some fairly obscure stuff.
Just to offer a heads up - there’s a new solution/site which is currently in Beta but is backed by good people (musicians). It needs an influx of music diversity (lots of metal at the moment) but if it gets that when it comes out of beta then it could very well be a good Bandcamp replacament - Ampwall
Vorta for Borg Backup - for linux and MacOS. You use it remotely but I use it for local backup because a) its encrypted b) its Borg so awesome and c) easy to use. I just pointed it at my home directory, told it where to place the encrypted backups and how often to make them.
I’ve had to recover files twice and recovery is just as easy as set up.
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?
Could be yeah. Very weird how it just started happening though. As far as I’m aware nothing on the websites has changed and I haven’t updated LW in the last week or so.
A few little things rather than one or two big things - email advertised as private but they won’t let you use anonymous addresses (like anonaddy or duck.com) for recovery addresses, an ever growing portfolio of products that seem unfinished or incomplete or lacking in standard features like they’re trying to corner the whole privacy market rather than making one or two products but making them really good, poor customer service and support as a continual theme throughout their existence.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting they’re doing anything dodgy, I just feel that I don’t really trust them. They just make really odd choices and it all feels like a haphazard rush.
You would think that someone at Proton would’ve had the foresight to realise the reputational damage this (along with the LLM announcement) would do to the company.
Without wanting to sound smart after the fact, I’ve been suspicious about Proton for years. I briefly had an email account with them but I could never quite shake the feeling there is something off about the whole company. This move just confirms to me I was correct to be suspicious.
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.
That’s an excellent point that I don’t see mentioned very often. Quite aside from the fact that Threads has popular scumbags like Libsoftiktok on it, they have 100 million users.
The existing fediverse is already struggling to moderate effectively. Various communities on Mastodon have already been exposed to vitriolic trolling and tools like fediblock are struggling to deal with it. Over here on the threadiverse, there have been numerous spam and CSAM attacks which, again, the existing tools are struggling to deal with.
If even just 1% of the Threads userbase are bad actors, that’s still one million bad actors all at once. Just the weight of numbers alone is going to swamp most instances.
More like fascist-adjacent. And we started the process of underdeveloping ourselves when the fascist-adjacent leaders persuaded the terminally ignorant that Brexit would be great when it was obvious it was going to lead exactly where it is leading right now.
Climate change is not something any one country can mitigate. It’s going to take all of us - the world.
In my own personal experience, Nextcloud;
Come on its obvious! Sedan - see Dan. Staring at a man called Dan.
Also ‘red’ has 3 letters, just like ‘gay’.