This is just Lemmy.World. You don’t have to be an admin here to help out Lemmy as a whole.

Just make a throwaway account. The VPNs work fine when you’re signed in.

I know that’s not an acceptable answer for some but if they want to associate your activity with a throwaway account, let them, because they still have no way of knowing which person on the VPN is using that throwaway account.

Let’s not pretend it’s all about “bad actors”. They don’t want masked traffic at all, the “bad actors” gives them an excuse.

And we know this because if the IP was the issue, they wouldn’t let you use the site at all, but they will work fine after signing in. Any of these VPNs work as long as you’re logged into reddit, even with a throwaway account.

Funny that she thinks it ruins it in the first place. I wouldn’t have even noticed if she hadn’t drawn attention to it.

Now, I say that, but I’ve also done this exact thing before.

Do I trust them? Sure, I guess, when it comes to privacy from other entities.

Do I trust that I will have privacy from Apple? Hell no. What does “local” even mean on an iCloud connected iOS device anymore? Because there’s nothing on that phone Apple can’t access remotely if they want to, and if any of the AI cache is backed up on iCloud, that’s not local anymore.

Do I trust them with the data they’re absolutely gathering? No, but I don’t trust anyone with it. But I also think that data would be relatively safer with Apple than their competitors.

If Apple announced Recall? Apple wouldn’t announce Recall, that’s the whole point. Apple wouldn’t be so brazen and stupid to push a tool that is so obviously invasive and so poorly implemented. Apple earned its trust by not making those mistakes.

But if they did decide to say fuck it and implement something like Recall, of course people would trust them. That’s what trust means: consumers take them at their word. But if it’s as bad as Microsoft’s Recall, Apple would burn all that trust when people found out.

People don’t believe Microsoft because they have long since burned any trust and good will for most of their consumers. They have proven time and time again they don’t give a shit about users’ wants or needs, and users have felt that. So when they announce Recall, they have no earned trust. No one believes their assurances. There’s no good faith to cushion this. And it turns out everyone was right not to grant them that trust.

Does that mean I’d ever use an Apple device? Hell no. I value my privacy, but I value it on my terms, not Apple’s, and I will never use a device that creates privacy through taking power from the user.

I don’t want to dismiss the facts. There are terrible things going on but overall we’re living our best lives at the same time.

You are dismissing the facts, then.

You could only truly believe this if you’re a financially stable, healthy, gainfully employed, cis white man. Because for everyone else in the States at least, life is getting harder. You can cite all the statistics you like about the globe, but that’s not relevant to what people experience in their own lives.

And more importantly, the things that people are depressed about are the things that are getting worse, and on track to keep getting worse. A video about statistics in 2007 isn’t accounting for what we know in 2024 is coming in the future. The outlook is far more grim now.

People have been saying this about social media and the news for a long long time, and every single time they fail to take the context into account. People said this in 2016, too. “Your anxiety is just the media riling you up”. Then the anxiety ended up being a very accurate thing to feel, and in the years after, the real world events caused negative effects on people’s lives.

The world is not a TV show. What happens in the news, what people talk about on social media, no matter how negative it skews, those things happen in real life, not a vacuum. Many of them affect you in ways you can’t even comprehend, and many of them affect you in very obvious ways that some people just seem to want to overlook.

That doesn’t invalidate the negative news, though. I mean, what good news do you think they’re not reporting that makes up for the actual shit going on in the world that has a real, tangible effect on people’s lives?

"Your future is completely fucked, from finances, to freedoms, to democracy, to the damn climate itself.

But, hey, the bees are coming back. For now, at least."

Every time I see people try to blame the media on this, I look at my medical bills, I look at my bank account, I look at the temperature, I look at the cost of housing, I look at the vacant seats where my coworkers sat before they were let go, I look at the election results, I look at my sister who had her right to an abortion stolen, I look at the hateful people that vandalized my trans partner’s car…

And I think, damn…the media sure has some real reach, don’t they? They’re really going all out to make me miserable. I mean, this is some impressive commitment to a narrative. One day I’m gonna break free and live in this reality where “Everything is fine, actually” with the rest of you but first I gotta figure out how the media has me in the Truman Show situation.

To offer the counterpoint:

Local and private communities, if they remain only for meta content, is fine. But if they are used for other content, because they don’t want other instances seeing or interacting with it, it can permit an instance to isolate itself and its content from the rest of the fediverse, while still being able to enjoy all the shared content from other instances. I.e. show me yours, but I won’t show you mine.

Then, if these local only communities are the only places where people on that instance are sharing certain content, it’s breaking the whole idea that it shouldn’t matter what instance you’re on. If instances can remain insular, it starts making more instances attractive based on their size. “If you want to enjoy this content, come join our instance.”

Also safer spaces for groups targeted by bigots

Then they need to ban the bigots. Why should only the people on that instance have access to the safe space? Why is someone from another instance instantly judged as making the safe space less safe? It’s basically saying “come join our instance”, which is, again, going to cause unintended consequences.

Maybe the central problem is racing to put other people out of work period, regardless of who they are. Maybe putting people out of work is not a net benefit for society, it’s actually negative in the long run, and only truly a benefit for shareholders. They don’t need any more of those at the expense of the working class.

Like how there was a damn good reason for the start menu button to be on the button right: you could fling your mouse the lower left and no matter if you did it too far or fast, it would always hit the corner, and be at the start button. You never had to “target” the start button, you simply went all the way down to the left. Didn’t even have to look.

So obviously, they must of had an equally smart, thoughtful reason to put it in the middle, right? That’s a decision born from utility, not aesthetics. Clearly not making a painfully obvious attempt at copying their main competitor.

Honestly? Any of them except the last one. My preference would be 2005-2015, but any of them is better than what came after. Late 2010s was alright, but around 2020 you can really tell UI designers got their marching orders.

It’s all so damn boring and lifeless. Rounded corners on literally everything for no reason other than trend chasing, wasted space and needless gaps between elements, white OR black - rarely anything else, lest it interfere with whatever systemwide adaptive coloring thing is running (even if there isn’t one), boring and lifeless icons/logos, an obsession with “clean” and “streamlined” that effectively equates to the removal of usability for aesthetics, etc. All of it copy and pasted to every single piece of software or app or site.

Its ironic you put Corporate Memphis images next to it in the 2015-2024 section, because that is effectively what this trend in design aesthetic will be remembered as.

Bland, lifeless, safe, focus-grouped garbage, implemented by companies that have reached a point where the innovation is dead, corporate consolidation has effectively destroyed any room for something new and original to enter the space, and the only thing they do anymore is trend chase. Even the slightest bit of originality or doing something different from the market leader may risk the potential loss of a sliver of shareholder profit, and that simply must never be done.

And I swear to God, if I hear one more focus group generated argument about how rounded corners are more inviting or human, I am going to break into your home, and personally change every last single doorway into a hobbit hole, and every window into a port hole.

I think they’re talking about the designs, not the whole decade.

Oh, so /r/drama shitposting is here now? Wonderful.

Give Summit a try. It’s got all those search options, and it seems to work well enough any time I use it.

If you liked RIF on Reddit, it’s far and away the closest I’ve found.

Can it be set up so you never have to worry about account switching? Unified feed from all accounts, then if I load up a Lemmy.world post, it defaults to the Lemmy.world account, but if I want to post to Dbzer0, can I set it to shift to that account automatically?

I’d argue the front ends should also provide users ways to see a more complete, instance-agnostic version of Lemmy. Like the first thing a user should see when they show up is just…Lemmy. not a page that suggests instances and all kinds of other things that they’re not going to understand.

Part of what made Reddit work is that it was a shared site, a shared hub, and every user saw the same thing depending on what they were subscribed to. I get that certain instance admins have problems with other instances, and I get that they might defederate from some for legal or security reasons. I know they also might police their servers for content and comments they don’t feel “fit”, and that’s their right.

But ultimately I don’t believe the user’s experience should suffer for that. If admins don’t want to host certain content on their servers, fine. I think that’s where the front ends and apps should come in.

Provide ways of unifying the experience of different user accounts on different instances into something more…well, unified. I don’t believe I should have to care about what instance I’m looking at Lemmy “from”, I should just be able to see the whole thing based on what I’ve subscribed to.

I know that’s a very complicated suggestion, and it might involve a lot of redundancies and crossed wires, and how the moderation would look is definitely a discussion (maybe a drop down list “see this community as moderated by ______”?)

But genuinely I think if an app can achieve something like this, it would go a long way towards making the experience more universal and attractive for an audience looking to come from elsewhere. They do not care about decentralization or instances, and we can’t make them care by lecturing them. So we do the next best thing and create a sort of facsimile of centralization.

Bad enough I have to let Microsoft constantly run on my phone, no way Adobe gets that privilege too.

Affinity Photo is on another planet compared to photoshop.

Other than 32 bit, what else have you got that actually sets it apart?

Because the single purchase license thing doesn’t look like it’s sticking around.

No, you can actually block them from adding additional devices. Once they add a TOTP device, they can not add or change to another without admin approval.

But more to the point, if the admin requires the management of the authentication software, I.e. Bitwarden or authy or whatever, then they clearly have concerns about the security of the MFA on the user’s device. If text messages are no longer considered secure then we move to the TOTP apps, but now if we’re just summarily deciding the apps are no longer considered secure, we’re demanding a secure app controlled by the admin must be used for MFA.

Can we not see where this is going next? Are we really under the delusion that because we have this magical Microsoft Authentication app now, MFA need never become more secure? This is the end of the road, nothing else will be asked of the user ever again?

If the concern is for the security of MFA on the user’s side of that equation, then trying to manage that security on a device that company does not own is a waste of time. Eventually this is not going to be enough.

So let’s just skip this step entirely and move on to fully controlled company devices used for MFA.