It’s an odd situation that we’re in where everyone understands that social media is swarming with bots and also are mostly unwilling to believe that it is affecting the social media that they personally use.

PTB - Power Tripping Bots

This seems like the normal ideological purging that takes place in any externally managed echochamber.

Remember, data scientists have proven that around 30% of all posts and comments leading up to the US election in 2020 were from automated accounts managed by threat actors linked to Russia, Qatar, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Those same data analysis tools indicate that in the post-LLM era bot traffic has grown 10x since then.

We know that the strategy of these groups is to occupy, support and promote the most extreme positions on any topic.

It stands to reason that these same threat groups are active on Lemmy and that should make you INCREDIBLY skeptical when you encounter an account/community/instance that displays extreme ideology. You’re never going to win an argument with them, because they’re not people who are trying to defend a position… they’re trying to make sure that anybody reading will only see their position propaganda.

This is done by using multiple accounts to post comments along with a brigade of cheap throwaway accounts which can be used for vote manipulation. It doesn’t matter if you make a devastating argument that clearly shows the OP/commentor is wrong if you’re buried under downvotes so nobody sees your comment.

This also extends to communities/subreddits.

An easy example that most people on the left are familiar with: r/conservative . It’s very clearly not an organic subreddit made up of a random assortment of the population, the comment section is so heavily pruned that you think Reddit is broken when you click ‘show 28 more comments’ and there is nothing there. If you post there with any comment that doesn’t imply your tongue is tickling Trump’s duodenum you will be banned very quickly.

I look at any instance that houses these extreme opinions in the same way. While I’m sure there are real actual human people who arrived at their position on their own and hold some of the ideas being promoted there, I’m equally sure that there are a huge amount of the ‘people’ and moderators are operating in bad faith if not outright maliciousness.

Benn Jordan on YT (music/DIY tech youtuber, not a political content creator) lays a lot of this out, with citations: https://youtu.be/GZ5XN_mJE8Y

It always is in the beginning

Don’t be evil

Only when you’re drunk

I was trained on Stack Overflow, OBVIOUSLY

It looks like you’re blaming the technology and not the corporations.

OpenAI didn’t invent machine learning, nor did they invent the Transformer model.

AI is not more responsible for OpenAI’s poor decisions than the electricity or the IP protocol, despite their also being key technologies required for the growth of OpenAI and all of the other AI companies.

If a person is driving a car wrecklessly, you go after that person… you don’t outlaw automobiles.

Once Wine made about 50% of my games playable I was dual booting because I liked the environment and customization.

Once Valve started contributing to the WINE project and released Proton most of my games were working and I was only swapping back to Windows to play a few games.

Now, I don’t have a game that doesn’t work on Proton(-GE-10) and exclusively use Linux. HDR was really the last item that I was missing and with the newest KDE/Wayland/Wine changes, it works with little fuss.

I cannot think of a single reason to recommend Windows if you’re even moderately technical. The problems you’ll have with Linux are different than the ones you’ll have with Windows but the big difference is that they are not happening in a black box and so you can troubleshoot some issues A LOT easier.

A crash happens in DirectX? You don’t have the symbols, nothing you can realistically do.

If you have a crash in Wine, not only do you have access to the full source code and the ability to write the patch and compile it yourself. You also have access to developers that are not bound by NDAs, a public issue tracker and the ability to use fixes made by other users without their risking prison time for copyright law violations.

There is no privacy destroying ‘telemetry’, no advertisements disguised as system messages, your data isn’t automatically uploaded to the cloud where you have to rent access to it, your encryption keys are not stored in on someone else’s computer, there are not mystery closed-source modules running in kernel space, the developers cannot force your system to update or deny you the ability to, and they do not force you to buy a new computer who’s only new feature is the ability to more strictly enforce IP laws and further tie your technological dependence to one of the 5 tech companies.

But, you can’t play Valorant, have to learn GIMP and you may one day have to type a terminal command… so, I mean, there’s that too

Privacy respecting Operating Systems (and to some extent software/apps) are almost useless if once they’re installed they are used to acess services/apps that aren’t. I see so many posts in self hosting forums about connecting google/apple/amazon cloud services to self hosted HomeAssistant, Nextcloud, etc. If the data is still being sent out to these “clouds” it’s not truly local/self hosted.

Well said. That’s always the bargain. It’s easier to use Google or AWS, there are less hurdles that you need to solve… but solving those hurdles is how you buy your privacy.

We don’t talk anymore, he’s a Red Hat now.

No worries, I’m glad to help folks.

My father used startx and his father before him, so I reckon I’ll use startx too (aliased to systemctl start sddm)

The only way you can get your privacy back is to learn how to use the technology that you depend on.

You don’t need Netflix or Spotify if you know how to install a docker container and operate bittorrent. You’re not required a spyware laden OS if you can flash GrapheneOS onto a Pixel and install Linux on your PC. You don’t need to use Discord for voice chat if you can run a Mumble server. You don’t need your ISP’s DNS (which they collect/sell data from) if you can install Pihole and setup DNS over HTTPS .

As others have mentioned there are a spectrum of ways that you are tracked online and offline and you have to be aware of each of them and address them individually. This will require a lot of research and self-education (though the community is, mostly, helpful), it isn’t as simple as using LibreWolf or installing a VPN on your phone.

As to your question. For the average person, a VPN is useful if you’re on a public wifi and want to make sure the other people in the coffee shop can’t see your Facebook posts, or if you want to appear to be in another state/country to access streaming in other areas.

It can help you, to a limited extent but installing a VPN on a carrier-purchased phone that has Facebook, Instagram and Google services is like locking the door after the house has burned down.

It’s a lot of work to take your privacy back. The Faustian bargain that everyone has agreed to is that they give up all of their privacy in order to have easy access to the fruits of technology. Getting your privacy back means giving the convenience back too.

I don’t want to discourage anyone… It isn’t inconvenient forever. Once you learn become comfortable with the technology you can have even better setups than you can buy through any service. For example, my tv/movie streaming still has password sharing, I can even generate a link for a random person that allows them to download the media file (which I only do with non-copyrighted material that I’ve produced myself, of course). Amazon can’t delete the books from my e-reader, my streaming music never plays ads, if I need more cloud storage I don’t need to increase my subscription… I just buy a piece of hardware with storage in it and install it in my home server (which everything connects to via a private VPN) and now I have space forever, with no subscription!

NewPipe blocks Youtube from showing you video ads in the middle of your videos.

Sponsorblock skips the sponsored ad reads, engagement farming, intro segments, etc that the creator puts in the videos themselves.

May save you a click:

No price yet, similar products have launched at $699

Any time you see people talking about Digital ID, just know that the end of that entire chain of thought is the requirement to have a secure hardware device to store the IDs (usually in the form of some kind of signed keypairs).

This could be a standalone device (like a Onekey) but the big push by Apple/Google is to just let them store/manage the keys in their infrastructure and on their phones.

Like every other aspect of our technical lives, they will try to win by creating an entire solution that requires no work or effort on the part of the users (the government in this case) so that the government can get digital ID compliant without actually doing any work or research that would be required to find the best method of doing it themselves.

This has been the playbook for a few decades. It’s why teenagers don’t know how to rip MP3s or use Peer to Peer networks… that’s hard to do, it’s much easier to avoid having to learn that by just installing Spotify who take care of all of the streaming infrastructure and music sourcing for you. Now that there is a technical dependence on Spotify they can enshittify, add tiering, add ads, remove music, etc and their users no longer have the ability to leave them.

Large tech companies manipulating/bribing governments to require the use of their software is pretty new and certainly a danger to people who want to own their own things and have privacy.

Right now, these kinds of laws are being passed with little to now public input or knowledge. These laws seem innocuous to the average person (who uses those kinds of devices anyway) but they give these platforms way more power over your daily life. It should be discussed more, but there are always distractions.

Right now, for me, the loss is mostly in using NFC payments. There’s no digital ID requirements that would force me onto a device in Google’s attestation chain. But, I am very aware of the issue that you’re talking about.

All of that is annoying and requires me to jump through several hoops.

Yes, that is true.

The important thing is that it is possible to use non surveillance capitalism software and services. The trade-off will always be that it is more work. This is because companies that harvest your information to sell can afford to spend a lot of money creating products that do everything for you.

They essentially say:

Don’t worry about buying media and managing it on your own hardware, it’s too hard to watch a youtube video and spend a few hours on something you enjoy… just install YouTube, Netflix or Spotify on your iPhone.

For the low, low price of your eternal technical dependency and loss of privacy we will manage your music and movie collection for you. Also, since there’s nothing you can do about it now that you’ve been lulled into a state of technical incompetence, there will be a $5 $8 $9.99 $12 $18 $19.99 subscription fee, HD sold separately.

The hoops thing is pretty bad too

print variablename

for the content I’m attempting to download, it requires me to pass some cookie settings to yt-dlp, which I believe involves first signing into YouTube, which I don’t want to do.

What is the error that you’re getting? You may not have the the javascript runtime that yt-dlp requires so you’re not passing javascript challenges that youtube requires before you get access to the video stream. More info here: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS

Even with the solver, you won’t be able to download any age protected videos without signing in.

DDoS is cheap to buy on the dark web it could be anybody with a grudge and a few thousand USD. It often costs more to mitigate the attacks than to launch them.