I also prefer freetube to the containerized web hosted softwares like Invidious because I sit at a personal computer all day.

Thanks for the gold!

Go ahead and use these services. I don't care about you, what you do or what you think. You are deeply unserious if you are not paranoid about the surveillance and I really have nothing to discuss with you.

My behavior is toxic because I am saying VPN services aren't safe? OK whatever. I really don't care what the fuck you do. Go ahead and pay money for these services 🤷‍♀️

You might have heard about Edward Snowden? Have you looked into anything that he leaked?

I am not worried about my torrenting traffic. I am worried about installing their software on my machine and giving them wide access including port mirroring.

Oh also people use VPNs to buy DIY hormones online, what happens when the inevitable US anti trans witch hunt happens?

Yes, a hosted seedbox paid with crypto and self managed keys is the way to go for torrenting

you don't really need to scare quote they in this context. The NSA and similar organizations are real and operating at this scale right now.

Will they compromise their back door to go after a pirate? No. Will they collect data on you to profile you and your activities and use that in the future? Yes.

It is not if, it is when the digital police state is imposed will we know the real end state of this level of data collection. My warning about them is not just about the pirates, its about installing their software and letting them port mirror you and cache your dns calls for years to target you later.

Yeah there is no way Surfshark, NordVPN and other services are compromised and or straight up run by the NSA

Just to tone set, I appreciate the rambling and thinking out loud, I'm kind of doing the same and if I don't write this intro people might think im mad or am dwelling but really I just want this to be better

for the record, Vegan Theory Club and Vegan Home Cooks moved off of lemmy.world ahead of this by several months because I don't agree with their philosophy or motivation. Mods and users of my instance were involved but me (tech admin) and Arcane Potato (admin) were not involved at all and to be honest I only sort of know what happened, I'm cooking food and posting about my gardening. To address your last thought first I do not care about fracturing anything, I don't view my instance as a "lemmy" instance, it is its own website with its own content and the rest doesn't matter. I'm trying to grow my local communities with local users and the federation is a bonus. In my experience online active forms don't need hundreds of thousands of people to be fun or interesting, Reddit needs that to sell ads.

There is no question that lemmy IS the same social media “mode” as reddit, a link aggregator where users can democratically sort news and articles and topics and discuss things. Lemmy is a clone of reddit, this can’t be disputed. The question is how to make it better than reddit and avoid the pitfalls. Right now moderation and admins are a bit problematic like e.g. the recent vegan clusterfuck.

Reddit has never been democratic and the votes drive a mystery algorithm with karma scores and the votes themselves live behind a wall of fuzzing that Lemmy does not do. There is also hidden moderation which isn't possible on Lemmy with the modlog. So there is a lot of cogs in making reddit content viable and it isn't simply what people vote on. My thoughts is that this is probably for the best if they're going to have them at all, but makes them kayfabe like WWE Wrestling. Direct democracy as what is occurring now on Lemmy sucks and is basically spam that favors bots and propaganda. In my take moderation and admins are not the problem, it is lack of quality users who are willing to contribute which is the signal and too much noise of douche bags with no ownership or respect shitting all over it. If people want a site to doomscroll while depressed on the toilet, I'm for sure not willing to pay for that. They should just use reddit. One really big and key difference is that I personally own the server it runs on and it is open source software with an open license that I am free to modify.

I think this is important to understand if federated media is going to succeed. We need most people, many of whom already pay subscriptions for spotify and hbo, to pay for and deploy instances. There are already managed service providers that host it for you for reasonable rates. I don't really think instances should have more than a handful of communities (if any) to avoid large centralized hosts like lemmy.world. Each instance is a collection of only the communities subscribed on that instance or created by one of the users and becomes a personal service for that person or small group of people. You're right about the fracturing and we see that now but I think that can be solved with multi-comm tags pretty easily. I think we should do more to promote specific communities than instances. For Vegan Theory Club, I really only want to promote !homecooks@vegantheoryclub.org and getting that entire thing out there is the goal.

To be honest I think 100 people per maximum per instance is probably a sweet spot where people who decide to pay for it can keep an eye on all the users and the costs for any one person won't spiral out of control (~12 usd/month for a hosted container service). I think having smaller instances of accountable users to each other is the end goal and it will take a lot of education, software development and changes to move in that way. To your point I think discoverability for communities is problematic now but this is beta and third party services might come up with something eventually.

Believe it or not I've come into contact with Microsoft Exchange 2010 running on Server 2008 for 2000 days once. The company had ransomware.