Relevant xkcd.

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/case/#B=1

I think it falls into the same pitfalls as most super niche communities, like a lot of subreddits did.

For example, the shaving subreddit (/r/wicked_edge I think?). Its mission statement was to introduce people to cleaner, safer, and more efficient shaving methods. And for the most part, with all of its resources and wikis, it successfully did it. But if you choose to stay after you’ve made your informed purchases, the posts were mostly braggarts showing off their latest hundreds-of-dollars handles, supreme razor blades, brushes made from actual gold, that sort of thing. My point is, the average person (by my guess, like 90% of people going to the site) gets the information they need and then never participate in the community again. But those who stay are those who really want to stay– people who are most likely to brag and boast. So over time, it falls more and more into plain old dick measuring contests.

This obviously isn’t true of all communities, but I think it’s a common pitfall for a lot of them. I can imagine privacy is very similar: take all the steps you can to learn to protect your privacy, and then… you’re good, for the most part.

"Error: Please choose a new password, chosen password is currently being used by $username$."

What a coincidence, I just started getting back into geocaches myself!

Anyway, all the advice here is great, but I’d also like to point out that we are on the fediverse. There aren’t that many people here, compared to other platforms, and the demographic is certainly skewed one way. You can definitely use these in your favor, but don’t get discouraged when you’re “only” pulling a few hundred, when that pretty solidly puts the community into one of the big ones (again, comparatively speaking). Things are just a bit more quiet here.

OP might maybe have had a shred of plausible deniability up until now as being someone edgy or wacky or whatever, or at best someone with a very active imagination. But that reply there pretty solidly confirms OP is just a downvote farmer.

Downvote and move on, no further point wasting any more of your brainpower on them.

Somewhat relevant XKCD

I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone “CC” someone else outside of business emails. Man, I like it here.

As others have stated, it’s usually as simple as downloading a torrenting program and finding something to torrent. There are many programs, and many sites dedicated to hosting torrented files, both of which would probably be breaking the rules of this instance if I were to link them. But for the sake of intellectual curiosity, if you look them up, you can find them easily. (If you’re interested in what torrenting is and why it’s different than just downloading, I’ve moved my paragraph to the bottom to ease the wall of text.)

As for internet privacy, there’s no one singular repository of information or “holy bible” as it were to adhere to. Internet privacy is something you just pick up over time as you get used to the Internet and indeed make many mistakes on your own. I’ve done my fair share of clicking shady links and losing access to my accounts in my day, and as they say, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. So don’t be so hard on yourself, you’ll learn in due time, one way or another. Don’t be afraid to ask more questions and make your own mistakes, it’s only human. Right now, as long as you’re partially aware of some of the dangers of the Internet, you’re already leaps and bounds ahead of other people, and that’s a-okay.

Anyway, as for the intricacies of torrenting, it’s actually a very interesting and seemingly complex but actually simple system. Torrenting is also called peer-to-peer transferring, which as the name implies, is done by transfering information between everyone! Like others have said in this thread, you’re not just downloading a file from some server somewhere, but you’re getting many many small pieces of information from potentially hundreds or thousands of different people. It’s like if you tried reconstructing a book by going to your friend John, and he photocopies the first chapter, then you go to your friend Mike, and he photocopies the second chapter, and so on. Files in a torrenting network are broken into small blocks, which are downloaded from other peoples’ computers, and then reconstruted as one file on your own computer! This does imply that, while you are downloading a file while torrenting, you’re also uploading it! When you receive information from others, your computer then also turns around and broadcasts that information to anyone in the torrenting network who still needs it. When you’ve fully downloaded the file, you can also choose to continue uploading and broadcasting the file for other people to download from. (This is called “seeding” and is typically seen as either a nice thing to do, or downright mandatory in some circles.) You can probably see now why piracy is so prevalent here, as it’s downright impossible to squash an entire network of people all sharing files amongst each other, and law enforcement can’t prevent everyone from doing it. (And if you’re taking proper precautions like using a reputable VPN, they won’t even know you’re torrenting anything at all!) It’s a very interesting system, one that I think is super neat, but it does have its positives and negatives. Hope you found this as interesting as I do!

Torrenting is simply a special method of uploading and downloading files. I can elaborate if you wish, but I’ll leave it at that. It’s worth noting that torrenting is typically used to distribute illegal media-- there’s nothing wrong with the act of torrenting itself, but because of the method of which torrenting is achieved, it’s mostly used to download/upload pirated movies, games, music, etc. Lots of legitimate things can be torrented, such as Linux distributions. If you’re ever considering torrenting media which may be illegal, make sure you’re fully informed. (Many will argue about the ethics of pirating media, I think this is beyond the scope of this discussion.)

As for metadata, “meta” means “self-referential”. So Meta data is data about data, which is to say, it’s information about itself. Metadata describes many aspects of a file. If you’ve ever opened the properties of a file and seen that it was “created January 1, 1980”, or “1.2 MB”, or “authored by Big Books Inc”, etc, that’s all metadata. In terms of privacy, some files could possibly have metadata such as the name of the user who created it, their geological location, the device the user used to create it, etc. I personally don’t think it’s something to be extremely paranoid over, but it is something worth looking a bit more into if you care about online privacy. Also worth noting that most image sharing sites and services strip images of their metadata when you upload them.

Playing factorio has given me a deeper appreciation of how much adding lanes doesn’t help traffic.

Adding an extra conveyor belt to your factory line won’t help you process materials any faster. You have to add more processing elements, widening the belt lines does absolutely nothing!