Back in the days we’d get free hosting and slap phpBB on it. Run for kids by kids, no pesky adult rules!

Those were the days. No credit cards needed, no nothing, just free 50MB of Apache/MySQL/PHP4 hosting with no strings attached.

If the fediverse was a thing I’d probably have had my own instance starting age 14-15ish.

I was totally above 13 or had parental consent when I went to forums in the early 2000s. I totally wasn’t actually 9.

It’s wild to me this concept disappeared? It’s literally never been a good idea to reveal you’re a minor online. The laws are against you. Companies don’t want to deal with a curated minor experience, even less so in the current times. If they do, you get the crappier version of things.

The worst thing to happen to the Internet is when Facebook normalized using your real name and real info online.

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They have no business collecting any data in the first place. If I wanted my data collected I’d be using Chrome like everyone else. I’m not choosing to use their buggy ass inferior and slower browser for any of Mozilla’s services, I’m choosing it because I want to support non-Chromium browsers and regain my privacy.

There’s no point whatsoever to using Firefox if it’s just a worse Chrome.

Nope. The protocol is way too public for shadowbanning.

You can be banned by other instances than your home instance, when that happens no new post/comment from you will federate to that instance in particular but the others still sees it as normal.

For example, I could ban you on my instance, and I wouldn’t see anything from you ever again, but my instance would be the only instance to see that ban.

If you get banned from LW or lemmy.ml then a lot of people won’t see you so that could definitely feel like a shadow ban, but there’s nothing shadow about it you can see it in the mod log.

It ran fairly well for me out of the box. I think it’s similar to trying to run Windows 98/2000/XP on modern VM software, it gets utterly confused and needs very specific hardware configuration to boot. Modern VMs run this good in big part because of paravirtualized hardware.

I think what made Ubuntu so good is a combination of being based on Debian and also being there at the right time when Linux software was getting generally better. When I tried Mandrake it was too early for Wine to run any sort of game, codecs were lacking for video. When I tried Linux again with Ubuntu, there was now VirtualBox and computers fast enough to run that reasonably, graphics drivers were more usable. Compiz was popping off to show off that Xorg could now do compositing like macOS and Vista.

Mandrake was good but limited by what Linux could do back then. Enjoyed it quite a bit but 9 year old me ran back to XP for the games. When I tried Ubuntu I was a bit older and more interested in programming and WoW ran great in Wine, so I managed to stick and have been on Linux since.

My very first distro I believe was Mandrake 10, it’s the distro that planted the seed to eventually switch for real with Ubuntu 7.10

There’s also a bunch of controversy around their premium features and it supposedly bricking devices it deems were pirated licenses.

Because phones are a mess of out of tree patches specific to that phone model with zero hope of being upstreamed into the Linux kernel without a cleaner rewrite because it’s not good, it’s made to work and nothing more. They do stuff like just copy pasting the drivers into the project for the next chip, make some changes, and now you have several versions of the same driver for a whole bunch of slighly different chips. The community can’t keep up with that or make it generic enough.

It’s improved but companies like Qualcomm also used to basically drop the code to the manufacturers when the chip launches and then move on with little maintenance for the code and stop maintaining the code once the chip is not produced anymore. Manufacturers don’t have the expertise to maintain that forever nor the will, so you end up with a kernel that keeps aging and isn’t keeping up with Android and the community hasn’t been successful in integrating it all either.

Google’s been pushing hard for this to improve but they’re the only ones to even care. Samsung and others would much rather sell you a new phone.

There’s also the problem that phones don’t really have a BIOS, the kernel is expected to just know where the devices are via the device tree. So each phone needs a specially built kernel for it too.

Projects like LineageOS often manage to push those phones a couple versions longer but eventually interest dies as well because of kernel pains.

Yeah the best campaigns I’ve seen for the Fediverse were reactionary to something happening on big socials: Lemmy when the API fiasco happened, Mastodon when Elon bought Twitter, recently Pixelfed to replace Instagram, and Loops the last 2 weeks before TikTok was about to get banned.

People don’t change because it’s better, they change because they’re pissed off at their current platform.

Good luck with “exhaustive” because people have different unique reasons to come to the fediverse. It would be a very long list.

For the average user I’d approach it with points that affects everyone:

• We can’t have a Twitter-style take over
• We can’t have a Reddit API disaster
• It’s distributed so while parts of the fediverse come and go, you’ll never lose the platform as a whole.
• It’s distributed geographically so one hostile country can’t silence information from other countries like Facebook and Twitter are doing.
• No algorithms designed to keep you scrolling forever
• No ads or commercial content being pushed by the algorithm
• Loads of choices for instances and moderation style for everyone’s taste.
• Users get to choose how they want to browse and with which apps: you’re not stuck with the latest crappy redesign you hate. You’ll never be forced to have reels and stories in your feed if you don’t want that.
• Not controlled by big corporations like Meta and Google, but rather the community for the community.
• If you have sensitive communities you can own the servers to ensure it’s survival in situations where Facebook would immediately ban that page/group.
• No bullshit AI products shoved in your face like Grok or Reddit Answers.
• You as a user are in control of what you see and don’t see.
• No advertiser friendly content policies forcing you to use stupid words like “unalive”, “pewpew”, “corn” or algorithmic downprioritization because you swore.
• If you prefer to browse Instagram-like, you still get to see Twitter-like post, and you friends can see your photos from a Twitter-like interface. Or you can have a Twitter-like interface and interact with Reddit-like posts on Lemmy.

It’s harder to onboard and figure out by the common people but it would be the final platform switch. You may move instances over time but you will never be left looking for a new platform because the old one enshittified. You just move to an instance that hasn’t, done.

En règle générale l’extrême droite s’approprie toujours des termes qu’ils ne maîtrisent pas, pour d’abord les vider de leur sens, puis les utiliser comme arme pour décrire un ennemi désigné

Exactement. Un peu comme maintenant ils prétendent que le terme “cisgenre” est une insulte.

Ils sont tellement habitués d’utiliser ces termes pour insulter les gens “pas normaux” qu’ils pensent que les autres font la même chose.

Ah t’es progressiste, alors tu dois nécessairement être anti-blancs! Racisme contre les blancs! 🤦T’es avec eux ou contre eux, c’est l’un ou l’autre.

Ces gens paniquent au moment où ils ne se sentent plus en contrôle, alors tout terme le moindrement compliqués, c’est la panique, ce sont les scientifiques qui veulent les arnaquer et leur injecter des puces 5G.

J’ai même vu des républicains sur les réseaux sociaux très vocaux contre les produits chimiques de la pasturization du lait, pour ensuite dire “c’est simple! Il suffit de le faire bouillir avant pour tuer les bactéries!”. Ah bah oué hein, si seulement ça avait un nom ce procédé. Ah oui, la pasturization 🙄

Ils ont cette ambiance de peur et de non-confiance envers tout ce qu’ils ne comprennent pas immédiatement. Si c’est trop compliqué, ça doit nécessairement être un complot secret et ces mots étranges doivent être des instructions codées visant à détruire la population.

They don’t even run their own index anyway, they rely on other search engines too. Kinda like how DuckDuckGo uses Bing under the hood.

So you might as well use SearX anyway, same thing.

This is the privacy community, not the piracy one.

You might want !piracy@lemmy.ml

Now is not the fucking time to give governments unlimited access to user data. If the UK has it, the US will have it too.

AWS does have plenty of VPN solutions for this, but likely not with the credentials you have because they’re usually very specific. And it’s probably intentional, if they wanted to give you VPN access they’d give you VPN access.

The website requests an image or whatever from 27748626267848298474.example.com, where the number is unique for the visitor. To load the content the browser has to resolve the DNS for it, and the randomness ensures it won’t be cached anywhere as it’s just for you. So it queries its DNS server which queries your DNS provider which queries the website’s DNS server. From there the website’s DNS server can see where the request came from and the website can tell you where it came from and who it’s associated with if known.

Yes it absolutely can be used for fingerprinting. Everything can be used for fingerprinting, and we refuse to fix it because “but who thinks of the ad companies???”.

A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.

IBM, in 1979.

This is wide open to send a nuke on allies and blame the AI.

They could also just be spawning Windows VMs directly in AWS, no point doing nested virtualization for something like this. Pretty sure they have a service for doing exactly what you described. No need for a VPN, it can spawn your VM on the right network already (they call it VPC). They can even put real GPUs for AutoCAD and stuff on those things.

It’s going to depend on how the access is set up. It could be set up such that the only way into that network is via that browser thing.

You can always connect to yourself from the Windows machine and tunnel SSH over that, but it’s likely you’ll hit a firewall or possibly even a TLS MitM box.

Virtual desktops like that are usually used for security, it would be way cheaper and easier to just VPN your workstation in. Everything about this feels like a regulated or certified secure environment like payment processing/bank/government stuff.