Agreed. Now would probably be a good time to give attention to adopting good privacy habits and services where you can.

Some examples:

1. Big tech email services have the possibility to rat you out and allow agencies to build a case against you through your emails, find out who you associate with, etc. Consider switching to a privacy focused email service, like Tuta, Posteo, Mailbox, or Disroot. Don’t rely on them to be impervious, but by using it, you’d make it much harder for them.
2. If possible, consider switching to a privacy focused phone, such as a google pixel flashed with GrapheneOS (very easy to do, even for non-technical people)
3. Use encrypted communications wherever possible. XMPP is a great federated option, but if you have to use Element or Signal, that’s still a great improvement.
4. Making Linux your main OS will go a long way to making your desktop more private, and you can still dualboot Windows for essential apps if you need them. I’d recommend Linux Mint generally.
5. While not a silver bullet, a good VPN can help mask your surfing from your ISP. I’d recommend Mullvad.
6. Consider using an encrypted password manager, like Keepassxc for desktop, or keepassdx for mobile. Bitwarden is a more convenient option, but be aware it uses the cloud (though it is encrypted).
7. A bit more extreme, but consider using an older car without trackers to avoid your movements being recorded if you cannot find a way to disable the tracking device in your new car.
8. Boost the resiliency of your community’s decentralized and encrypted communications by expanding your local meshtastic nodes.

I hope you’ll buck the trend, and show them it can be done :)

There’s Sepia Search, but I don’t really understand why that’s not just built into the Peertube UI itself.

I would very much appreciate the ability to explore other instances and see what channels are hosted there from my own instance, instead of having to open the new instance in a new tab, then copy and paste the link to each interesting channel into my instance to be able to subscribe to it.

I wish there was a similar feature for Lemmy as well.

Noam Chomsky would call that phenomena Manufacturing Consent, which highlights the importance of citizen controlled media, which has a much better (though not guaranteed) chance of accurately reporting on reality

I’m actually going to suggest; Yes, possibly. But for a very specific reason.

While much of social media isn’t ultra necessary, federated social media could be quite essential to collectivising and resisting state and corporate manipulation and propaganda. All other forms of media and news are corporate or state controlled, and thus can construct and project false narritives that are beneficial to their aims, much to our collective detriment.

Social media has become the dominant way that many, possibly most people, see the news, discuss such news with eachother from people around the globe, and build a picture of what’s going on outside of their isolated part of the world. I think Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent gives a pretty fantastic argument on the importance of citizen controlled media, and federated social media is about as citizen controlled as it can possibly get. It’s non-corporate self-hosted open source software as far as the eye can see! It’s not perfect, but holy shit this is as powerful as a tool to diseminate ideas and information on a grassroots level that we’ve ever had, and we should not underestimate its usefulness in the coming decade.

I can’t read that last line in anything but Rollie Williams’s voice

An excerpt from “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45”, an interview with a German after WWII on why they didn’t rise up:

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

Dude.

This is the same guy who, just a couple weeks ago, publically endorsed the AfD (the far right nazi party in germany), saying “Only the AfD can save Germany.”

For context, this AfD (That is a real ad by them). Look familar?

Surely you must see these aren’t just a series of unfortunate coincedences?

We should keep in mind that it’s a systemic problem, which means we should change the system. Sure we’ll rely on technology, but that alone won’t be enough and we’ll have to rethink how we live with other people.

Agreed. While I think renewable energy will be essential, prefiguring new horizontal structures before things collapse and implementing the groundwork to transition away from endless growth and capitalism will be just as important.

but we shouldn’t think it will be easy to live in a peaceful world. As Trump is elected, there are some clear sign we will go to war…

It certainly won’t be easy, the next few decades look to be quite dark indeed. I hope we can avoid all out war, the suffering in Ukraine and Gaza alone is incomprehensible.

For more of a focus on affordable used mini PC homelabs, I’d recommend Hardware Haven’s content instead.

I agree entirely, especially as modern systems massively ballooning the required knowledge and skill.

However, I do think there could’ve perhaps been a happy medium, where OS’s retained and continued to develop a simple, built in way to program easily and without setup to retain the spirit of what BASIC provided.

I guess I’m imagining a sort’ve evolved version of Hypercard, which seemed to be on the path of providing something like that.

The beauty of HyperCard is that it lets people program without having to learn how to write code — what I call “programming for the rest of us”. HyperCard has made it possible for people to do things they wouldn’t have ever thought of doing in the past without a lot of heavy-duty programming. It’s let a lot of non-programmers, like me, into that loop.

David Lingwood, APDA

There seems to be Decker as a spiritual successor, which is pretty neat.

Yarr! 😉

Well, for one, our police are pretty damn aweful. More than a few times, calling them for help can result in things getting worse, or they shoot the person calling for help due to being so poorly trained and trigger happy.

So although most people will never need to defend themselves, it’s not a zero percent chance. Home invasions do happen, and unfortunately hate crimes against minorities and LGBT communities can happen too. Some of those people may wish to have a viable way of protecting themselves against those who may do them harm, because in some of those situations, pepper spray might not be enough, and calling the police may not be an option.

They don’t, the only people who own many guns generally do so as a hobby.

Statistically most people will never need a firearm to defend themselves, though they may have one anyway for the small chance that they do. But it’s not a requirement to survive, it’s just a little bit of extra insurance.

The other user responding to you, Knightly, is IMO exaggerating the dangers quite a bit. While the US is certainly more dangerous than most of Europe, the risks of being harmed are still quite low if you’re not involved in illicit activity or looking for trouble. Going by statistics, by far the most dangerous thing you can do while in the US is to simply drive in a car, and I imagine driving in Europe is similarly dangerous.

If you feel the need for something to defend yourself, a small can of pepper spray is generally very effective, quite affordable, and legal in all 50 states.

From what I’ve gathered recently, the Mullvad browser left unmodified and combined with a VPN is one of the most private browsers you can use, short of using Tor.

It’s also possible to build a very effective and safe alcohol space heater with about $7 of parts, which can be kept on-hand in case of emergency.

“Because capitalism” isn’t a convincing argument to people who aren’t already against capitalism, so I think things like this that go more in depth and show you how it’s effecting us directly is very useful. And again, it has some cool history in there too that’s interesting in its own right. :)

It goes over the history of how furniture became more and more cost reduced, and in particular how workers are screwed over by the quest for profit, since the channel is focused on Unions.