Privacy is about reducing your footprint, not erasing it. We’re not spooks. If you use the internet in any kind of capacity, for content, or shopping…there will be some kind of record of you. You just want to reduce it.

Get rid of noscript. 99% of the internet needs javascript to work. Stick with Librewolf or some kind of Firefox based browser using UBlock Origin. If your super strict Librewolf settings are breaking certain sites, ease up on them until you find it tenable. You don’t need Tor. Tor has always been slow.

Get an extension called Privacy Badger.

Two things you should do that wasn’t mentioned in your OP:

1. Manage your own DNS. I use Technitium, but AdGuard and PiHole are 2 other options that do the same thing. Managing your own DNS is a big privacy win especially when you’re not on a VPN.
2. Buy a domain to manage your email. Using the same email address on different accounts is a big privacy issue. Companies hash emails and pass them around. So if you use your email address for an account on Company X site, and also on Company Y. Y can send X a hash of your email, and they can see that you have accounts on sites X & Y. And then boom, serve you ads related to them.

If you have an domain associated with an email, you can create addresses at will when you make accounts. So in this scenario, you’d have companyX@mydomain.com, and companyY@mydomain.com. The hashes wouldn’t match. And if you only use that email for that one site, you’ll never be cross-referenced.

Windows 11: The worlds premier Sloperating System

You’re correct OP. I think the difficulty of modern times is multifaceted. A lot of other comments here speak to various parts of it these days, but I want to add one I’ve noticed related to this issue.

Pre mid-2000’s, technology worked for us. If you look at the hayday of tech (1980 thru early 2000’s), it seemed like every tech innovation was aimed at the consumer. The tech got better and we did too. The tech worked for us.

Nowadays (and I think I can see all this turning course around the time of the 2008 collapse), tech is not for us. The consumer has become the product, and tech is built around working through us instead of for us. Manipulating us instead of helping us. It sucks.

I have no doubt that if the washing machine was invented today instead of like ~100 years ago, they would be the size of car, and only installed in corporate offices. You’d have to go to an office to get your clothes washed. Consumer-level washers wouldn’t be a thing. They’d tie it to work like healthcare. It seems like no one is interested in making quality consumer devices. The consumer devices we do have are designed to become obsolete quickly without any repairability, so you buy another fast (i.e. all modern cars).

So yea, I think when you add this on top of everything else, it help explains what is amiss with life today. My 2c

If OP can wait, GrapheneOS is partnering with Motorola, but those phones won’t be available until 2027.

The left hand side is whenever I rice a fresh install. The right hand side is whenever I have to edit /etc/fstab

I’m splitting hairs a lil bit - you’re pretty much correct. Minors are not citizens, so they don’t have rights. Minors are wards of the State. They under State protection, and as such don’t have the ability to forgo that protection, until they turn 18.

Knowing this along with the game STALKER, it seems like Ukrainian studios are the kings of immersive jank.

Would a Roku work? Forgive my ignorance, not sure if they count as android based

Thanks so much! Great info. I had a question - can I group communities together into a custom feed? I can currently view all subscribed on my Home feed. But if I have , for example, 6 news communities, can I group them into a single “MyNews” style feed?

Per an article from last week, she hasn’t “ruled it out” but hasn’t committed to it either.

Ohh! Right on! I’m rocking EndeavourOS. Been my desktop go-to for a while. And just started the community here. Love me some debian though, it powers all the servers in my homelab.

Oh my goodness you’re correct! Ty so much

I’m an iOS guy, and have been sideloading Apollo. But even then, reddit has been slowly coming after that. So grateful I found lemmy before they completely pull the plug there.

No you’re absolutely correct. I vividly remember reddit 18 years ago. Pretty much every post on every subreddit was intentional. Early on, even the concept of comments on posts was disputed as a good feature or not. Now its entirely different. The big reddits now are ones like poursTea, sipsTea, different variations of infuriating, and WhitePeopleTwitter, etc. They’re all basically rage bait holes, designed to get an emotional reaction out of you, and the comments are people arguing with bots, or bots arguing with bots. And with the scale on reddit now, you can effectively doomscroll /r/all, as more and more posts flood in. It’s not far off from Instagram and TikTok.

Lemmy has less posts, less upvotes, but they are all [presumably, hell I’m sure there’s an exception] real.

It’s feels like trading in a giant box of cheese balls for a small, but very nicely cooked steak. Smaller but actually filling.

Ty so much for the tips! I’ll look into all of those. To start, I sat down with my subreddit list, found correlating communities here, subscribed. Now my subscription feed here looks very similar to my legacy reddit home feed.

I wanted to ask about starting a community. As I understand it, you have to be an admin (or a privileged user of some kind) in order to create a community on a given domain/federation. Is there a process to go about doing that, or is it more correct to start your own federation?

The reason I ask is that my favorite linux distro doesn’t have a lemmy. I think it’d be awesome to start it up. I’m not against going through the labor of spinning up a lemmy if that’s most correct, but would prefer leverage what already exists, if that’s a possiblity.