Ones like Lemmy fit in fine to my threat model. They enable me to use privacy tools up-to-and-including Tor routing, without a phone number or other personally identifying info (you can’t do those with many other social media platforms). I can use the Fediverse pseudonymously, and if I ever want to, anonymously.
I’m not hiding this conversation from you, but I am hiding my identity from companies.
As my previous post implied, socialism can refer to a school of thought/philosophy, or a movement, or a political position. China’s government clearly does not claim it has achieved a society with a socialist mode of production (which I’m assuming is what you mean by “real socialism”?), but that doesn’t contradict their claim of being a socialist, and further, communist party.
Furthermore, free healthcare is irrelevant. It’s not a precondition of socialism. The working class can control and own their means of production without having free healthcare. It’s a great policy which I support, but it’s not socialist.
which depends on what qualifies as socialist.
This is the critical point in a lot of these online arguments. “Socialist” is such a vague term that two people can unknowingly be reading completely different questions from the same statement. It can mean anything from a person following a school of thought (“I’m a socialist”, “We are a socialist party”, “The socialist movement”) to a description of economic conditions (“That commune has a socialist economy”), let alone looser usage (e.g. describing social policies within capitalism, people who have no understanding of socialist theories calling things socialist, etc.). When possible, I find it’s best to avoid the whole “thats not real socialism” spiral by being more specific.
It was released (read: forcibly shoved down our throats) by Google and came out of nowhere when there were zero problems with the decades old and extremely well researched incumbent image/video formats that the web was already using (i.e. jpg, png, gif, mp4, etc)
I don’t agree with this. There are many things wrong with those file formats. GIF, for example, is over 35 years old and has a 256 color pallete. Now, if it’s good enough for your purposes and it “ain’t broke” for that, fine, but compare these formats to JPEG-XL and it’s clear that they deserve to be surpassed. WebM/WebP, despite my many issues with it (WebP and AVIF are bullshit formats), they did serve a legitimate purpose, and quite frankly you can even say it was good for the environment due to lowering filesizes at an actually meaningful scale.
In fact, if I’m reading Mitre correctly, there are libjpeg vulns still being found since WebP was launched. I’m not saying this to equivocate the two from a security standpoint, hell no, but to critisize the common view I see online claiming the older formats are unbackable.
Not communist obviously
I find it’s useful to select more descriptive terms than use the literal dozens of varying definitions of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’. The terms by themselves can be so vague that I can truthfully state this - “communism is the goal of communism!” A communist society, for example, is different from a communist party or a communist state (aka. Marxist–Leninist state), which are only parts of the communist movement and the communist school of thought. Obviously no-one looks at the PRC and sees a stateless, classless society, but that’s an understandable (albeit condescending) interpretation of when people say “China is communist”.
(Pinging @xnx@slrpnk.net as I’m also replying to their comment)
Sure, I agree, but at the end of the day it’s useful to be able to search and watch YouTube videos so long as it’s a popular platform because it still has by far the bulk of topics covered.
Carl and the Aqua Team make their position on piracy very clear.
Reminder to be aware of darknet mirrors like I2P sites and Tor .onion services - domains aren’t controlled by a company so they can’t just be taken down by a legal request.
For z-lib, the Wikipedia article lists their .onion and I2P addresses (I haven’t verified them so check before bookmarking): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library
It’s less a dogwhistle and more just explicit symbolism, just substituting the swastika so that it’s not a swastika.
This was interesting. I know two of the small communist sites I use are hosted on these services so it’s good to know how stable the ground is.
Thanks for the detailed reply :)
I agree with all your points, it is misleading and potentially harmful to use a strong term like spyware to refer to all of those things, without further context. I guess I'm still used to a couple of tech circles where people would jokingly throw 'spyware' around to describe anything and everything, so I didn't realize how misleading it really is. Especially when it's applied to things like automatic updates, which only the most extreme security models consider more of a risk than a security feature.
That website has a very strict, unusual interpretation of 'spyware'. Even if all the telemetry and unprompted connections made by Mozilla Firefox are in good faith and legitimate features, that website still labels it 'spyware', as it is revealing unnecessary information without your consent.
The same website gives Tor Browser a 'Not Spyware' rating, as it (necessarily!) removed the default features of Firefox that concerned them.
Side note - I think you may have accidentally marked your account as a 'bot account' in the settings.
It's Chromium-based, so I don't understand how it could be "configured in the same way".
That website is […] full of verifiably false information
Could you please provide and example or two? I wish to verify it, since I didn't notice any last time I checked the site.
they act as if any and all [unprompted] connections a browser makes are automatically bad and “spying”.
They're very clear that this is their approach (bold text on the home page). Even if you disagree with their definition, that doesn't make the site bad. And there are many valid situations where a threat model should be this strict, consider anti-government activists in any country.
They even claim that Tor Browser is a “spyware”.
It says "Not Spyware". https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/tor
Firefox gets a high rating on default configuration.
The next line explains that with custom configuration, it becomes Not Spyware.
This is true, politics is not something distinct which can be considered separate from or optionally added to society, culture or economics, although Lemmy is also explicitly political. That might be more what I intended to say.
(The real kicker is realizing that abstaining is not politically neutral.)
Yes. This is a different platform, I’d rather we don’t just transplant all the reddit problems here.
Lemmy is inherently political. It was and is a revolt against reddit’s staff, their business model and the influence of US politics, media and corporations on their platform due to their advertising model. This place wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t political differences.
We’re not here to impress people who were banned for spreading Nazism. Go to all the reddit-clones that started in the early 2010s when reddit got called out for hosting toxic racist-or-fascist hate communities and communities sexualizing minors (e.g. /r/jailbait).
The book Manufacturing Consent has an excellent analysis of how advertising is one of the major filters which affect the content of news. Regardless of whether it is surveillance ads or not, the model of advertising, while lucrative, profoundly compromises the integrity of news.
Of course, I understand (and I believe the book also suggests) most news can’t be expected to self-sustain and compete without having ads in their economic model. So this isn’t a rebuttal to the article’s discussion on “Non-creepy” contextual ads.
Privacy-focused isn’t a term I’d choose, but it certainly allows privacy-concerned people to use it, and like you said, avoiding the capitalist surveillance crap that for-profit companies are pulling.