I actually did that for a while (on my PC at least). Major pain in the ass unfortunately.

Of course it’s good to block that crap, but usability takes too much of a nose dive. I do live in the EU though, so when it comes to data protection things have gotten a lot better in the last years.

Install Firefox (also works on mobile!), add uBlock Origin (also available on mobile!), done.

At first I never used it, always thought typing with two fingers was the fastest (and actually got me the result I wanted).

Nowadays I swipe 99% of the time on my Android phone and it is a lot faster. Especially when your phone learns the words you like to use. It’s not perfect of course and you will have to correct some words down the line (it still sometimes refuses to swipe “Fuck”), but overall I’m faster with it.

Also super comfy for long and complex words when you just roughly swipe it and get the full word written there without errors.

Overall though I prefer to touch type on a proper keyboard on the PC, that’s still the fastest :)

It’s also a shitty take because it hypes up Meta. Which basically took Instagram (handling billions of users posting text, images and videos) and creating Threads by turning images and video off. It’s the same user accounts too.

That’s like Google creating YouTweet by taking their YouTube platform and reducing it to video comments only. Then praising them that they managed to launch a text based service in 2023.

Why not actually talk about Mastodon instead?

This is a shitty take. Twitter ran perfectly fine before Musk took it over.

Turns out if you don’t pay your hosting bills, or your office building bills, fire most of your engineers (after annoying them with bullshit) and making rash decisions without consulting people with technical know-how your service goes to shit.

Musk was stupid enough to DDOS his own service because he doesn’t understand it. Blocking public access to tweets while having tweets embedded in millions of websites turned out to be a really bad idea. Simply because Twitter engineers always expected Tweets to be publicly available, so they kept retrying to fetch the data. There’s probably a hundred+ developers at Twitter who could have told Musk that little tidbit.

This is 100% on the egomaniacal billionaire and has nothing to do with the technology.

Ever heard of .bat files? There is no need for admin rights to steal company and user data. All it takes is opening the wrong file. Windows is also terrible about file names, per default extensions are hidden. So you can have a file named “report.pdf.bat” for example and it will show for most users as “report.pdf” with a funny icon. It’s a terrible default setting security wise.

Btw. you’re still comparing a desktop OS with a phone OS. You have to compare Android with iOS. Or Windows with Linux and macOS.

Yeah, I have no clue how they make software that’s so damn inefficient.

Don’t even get me started, for example I bought a personal license from Jira (Atlassian) to run on my Linux server. Tiny university project, 5 users (with no one using it most of the time) and the thing ate up all my memory and used half my CPU cores just by idling. That server also hosted Minecraft, which used less resources than that…

That’s a weird question, you are comparing a desktop OS with a phone OS (except you are talking about Windows phones, but I don’t think you are?).

All it takes to kill your Windows installation is double clicking a random .exe file (and being unlucky that Windows doesn’t warn you about this particular file). And nope, if it is a custom program your antivirus won’t detect it either. Every time I hear of a company getting a crypto locker on their systems it was over a Windows PC (mostly by email). I haven’t heard of your average company getting compromised by a phone yet (but those phones usually don’t have network access to shared drives…).

Android is relatively locked down, a lot more than Windows. Even if someone sends you malware per email, there is no easy way to execute it on your phone. It’s also not true that you can just install a rogue APK in two clicks, you have to do the following steps:

1. Open the Settings app on your Android device.
2. In the Settings menu, tap Apps.
3. Tap Special app access (or Advanced > Special app access).
4. Tap Install unknown apps.
5. Select an app to use to install an APK file—your browser and file management apps are the best option here.
6. Tap the Allow from this source slider to allow APK files to be installed via that app.

Definitely not something that happens by accident :)

Overall for your average user I’d say Android is safer.

From the view of a small team that actually paid for GitLab Bronze: Their pricing is a mess and they keep changing things. We went with GitLab at first, Bronze tier, everything was great.

Then they removed Bronze tier (which was $4 per user per month) and only offered a premium tier from then on, $20 per user per month. Which is insane if you look at GitHub pricing.

So instead of paying that much we went with the free tier afterwards. Then GitLab limited free tier repos to 5 users max. Which was yet again annoying and we had to act on that.

In the end the company moved to GitHub, all we wanted was a stable solution we pay for and be left in peace. GitLab kept messing with things and wasting developer hours (Damn meetings with management). GitHub still has a $4 per user per month tier, GitLab… wtf… just raised the price again to $29 per user per month. Are they insane?

But that has always been a thing. Just like Reddit mods banning you from their subreddit just because you posted in another subreddit they didn’t like. It sucks, but it’s nothing new.

If either a server admin or a community mod doesn’t like you for what you’re doing, they can kick you out. It’s the same as if this was an old time forum and you pissed off the admin.

With lemmy you have to watch two things:

1. Trust the instance admin you sign up with, this is where your account data lives, the admin can read everything on your account. Hell, even your password if they manipulated the instance code, so use a random one

2. Trust the moderators of the communities you interact with. If you interact with a community and the mods there don’t like you, they can just remove your posts for example. Same as with Reddit

A random person outside of your instance or communities you interact with can’t do much. They can “steal” your posts and comment data and see your votes. But that’s it. They can’t block your account or kick you out of your favorite communities. They could obviously harass you (just your account, not your email), but then you can block them. Or ask the admin to block their entire instance.

The moment you make votes anonymous (which would theoretically be possible) you open up a million ways in which votes can be manipulated. So congratulations, that ad post from some random company has 12k upvotes now.

Only alternative is still connecting it to a user, but only registering that they voted (but not if it’s an upvote or downvote, that’s anonymous again), but then you can never change your vote again afterwards. So if you misclick the downvote button there is no way back.

With the current solutions in place, if you want to remain anonymous: Don’t create an account, just lurk. Or don’t upvote/downvote/comment on things. It’s as easy as that.

Just like putting your real name online and then complaining when others can see it on Facebook… your account is as anonymous as you want to make it.

I mean I didn’t upvote or downvote porn on Reddit either. It’s all personal information.

On Reddit there were plenty of people with access and the data was sold to advertisers.

Here it’s public, not great but not terrible either. Also makes it easier to battle vote brigading?

Just don’t vote then? Reddit also told advertisers what you’re into, it was just over backchannels with money involved.

Or create an account that has no links to your private live, then you can vote as much as you want.

Bluetooth doesn’t make much sense, as you usually only have one device active. But you can easily rule this out: If you have Android for example, long press the Bluetooth button, then check paired devices. Is there any device you don’t recognize? Remove it. Done.

Bluetooth is usually encrypted, so if you didn’t accidentally pair your device with your neighbor’s there is no way they can listen in.

And even more important: Check for carbon monoxide in your home. You might be having health issues and are hallucinating or making things up.

Besides that: It might be possible your neighbor hears you talking on the phone (through the walls for example or with a bug in your home), but there is absolutely no way they’d hear the other side of the conversation. So either your side alone would already give them all the information or something else is up (see above).