Leraje @ leraje @lemmy.blahaj.zone

This account is now backup only. I have moved to https://piefed.blahaj.zone

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2 yr. ago

Without wanting to stir that hornets nest again, it wasn't so much about that four letter company reading what we wrote on Lemmy that people were concerned about, more that it was inevitable wed end up seeing content from the sort of right wing shitfest accounts like libsoftiktok etc and the so-called minority groups here would be brigaded by masses of these people.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Humans are funny

No, I don't think so. Today I've read and participated in some great threads about UK politics, the books people are currently reading, some great metal (the music genre) recommendations, Linux distros that are both privacy respecting but easy to use and a few other things.

I was on reddit pretty much from the start of the Digg migration. It's not really comparable as reddit didn't have subs or comments at first it was literally a link aggregator with votes. When they did start appearing it was OK and then it got increasingly not OK very quickly. I took long, long breaks from it over the years and every time I succumbed and returned with a new account it was noticeably a lot worse. I won't go back again as it feels like every sub, even the smaller ones, are just bombs either constantly going off or about to go off. It thrives on negativity.

Lemmy simply isn't like that. I'm not naive enough to think it never might be, but right now it's not. Of course there are fall outs and anger but not at the same level of constant vitriol I got accustomed to seeing on reddit.

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.

I'm currently reading Fool's Fate, the third in the Tawny Man trilogy, which itself is the 3rd trilogy in the Realm of the Elderlings sequence by Robin Hobb. I've loved every book so far and this is no exception although ::: spoiler spoiler I'm still grieving Nighteyes :::

Poor Fitz has had a shit life so far. I'm hoping he gets some sort of happiness before the end of this one.

The Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian is one of the greatest series of novels I've ever read. The movie Master & Commander with Paul Bettany and Russel Crowe was an amalgamation of 2 or 3 of the books in that series. It's also the title of the first book in the series.

Yes, these parents are essentially (and knowingly in some cases) pimping their kids and that is awful.

But let's not minimise the fact that the pedo's are the ones creating this situation. They're the ones sexualising these kids, they're the ones leaving fucking awful comments, they're the ones trying to coerce and threaten, they're the ones curating huge Telegram groups instructing other men how to locate these posts.

And let's also not minimise Meta's role in all this either. Reading that article it was clear that Meta literally don't give a fuck about these kids. At all.

Yes because:

1. There is a visible action taking place. You are standing for something you believe in. This gives other people who may lack confidence or opportunity something to notice.
2. Those in authority cannot claim what they do is an unopposed position.
3. Those you are protesting on behalf of, even if they are going through hell, know that someone somewhere is not prepared to let their circumstances go unnoticed.
4. Those you are protesting against know that someone sees what they are doing.

I think the thing with open source (re: your free labour point) is that it's entirely voluntary free labour - I know that wasn't the thrust of your point but there are pros and cons to it. The lead dev could one day say 'fuck it' and walk away, but for a project of any size/popularity there's a lot of people ready and willing to fork it or ask for ownership to be transferred. It's not very often a very popular bit of code is totally abandoned.

Open source, to me, offers a sort of peer review system. Most people developing open source stuff already care about code quality and privacy, contributors also do and the myriad of people using it have a core set of people who also do. That's a lot of eyes. There's also tools to diff code so its pretty easy to spot changes. And I do do that.

But I take your wider point - it all eventually comes down to trust. But that's true of legal requirements too. And also organisation behaviour. Brave for example have been caught at least 3 times doing very dodgy stuff and yet as far as I can tell they continue to grow. I don't necessarily accept that one instance of law breaking or otherwise poor behaviour is instant death for a company. If it was, G and Meta would be long gone.

All I can do is reiterate that all of us have different things that we choose to place some trust in and we all have different ways of assessing what leads us to trust. But at the end of the day, there are no cast iron guarantees.

I self host just about every service I can, including search.

You're asking for a guarantee, which I've repeatedly admitted I can't offer because absolutely no one can provide that. No provider, no service, no software. All we can do is decide what we each consider to be actions/behaviours indicative of trust and use their offering in a way that maximises privacy for us as individuals. I put more trust in software/services that has code that anyone can read, that has been independently audited, that is trusted by the community and possibly tested in a legal environment. You might put more trust in things like privacy policies and other legally binding documents. Neither of us can guarantee anything however. I've lost count of the number of companies who've violated privacy laws and users only find out years or even decades after the fact.

But I'll say it again - whats right for me might not be right for you and that's fine.

That's absolutely your call mate. I'm not here to tell you you're wrong. I just know what it is that I personally consider to be active steps towards establishing trust and that I base my opinion on them. If yours and mine don't align, so be it - to each their own.

You're right, anyone can scrape Lemmy. But that's not the issue (to me anyway) - Reddit have sold user data - user generated content. None of what they're profiting from was generated or created by them. Are Reddit users who did generate all this content getting a slice of the profits?

When I post on here I know it's all open for anyone to access but that's true of any non walled garden space. I've accepted the fact that it's going to get fed into the hungry maw of some AI behemoth or two.

What Reddit have done is make money for doing absolutely nothing based on content others have created like some sort of technological tapeworm feeding second hand. And along the way they killed off a lot of tools that users loved, moderators found made their jobs easier and people with a visual disability found vital. And all this so u/spez can live out his mini-Musk fantasies.

Again, I'm not considering them to be intentionally malicious or deceptive, I'm saying without the basics in place, we're being asked to just trust them.

I'm aware of the limitations you describe and you're right that there's no way to 100% guarantee anything, there has to be some element of trust. So the services/software I choose to use have done all the things I mention, or I run them locally. Does that mean they're 100% perfect? No, of course not but the fact they've gone to great lengths to establish at least a basis for trust means a lot to me. Some of them have gone on to be tested in some sort of legal encounter where again, they performed well.

Trust is a personal thing, we all have different perceptions of what makes an org trustable - if Kagi match yours, good for you.

I don't suspect or accuse them of anything. Quite the reverse - what I'm saying is that without things like open source code, privacy audits etc, we're being asked to take their word for it all. They might well be the most privacy respecting company ever and they equally might not be. If you're happy to take their word for it, that's entirely your call. I'm not trying to change anyone's mind, I'm just answering OP's question with my own opinion.

I'd just like to reassure Lemmy that there are a lot of us (Brits) who are fully aware of the shitness of our Imperial past and its negative (and still felt) effects on people all over the world.

The only excuse I can offer for this persons stunning lack of tact and knowledge is that the Empire is not really taught in any meaningful way in British schools. It's not unless one chooses to discover for oneself what our ancestors did that you can find out the true horrors of it all.

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.

Great. Now I have to turn my passport in.

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