Liam Mayfair

That’s a fair point about the portability of their protocol. And yeah, you’re right that they don’t encrypt everything. I’d meant to say “they encrypt everything you can encrypt without making the email undeliverable” but my fingers decided to type something else.

I’ve been using Tuta Mail for a few years now. No complaints. Most of the features you would expect. Lack of IMAP support is kinda disappointing but survivable. Their email security is very strong though — they encrypt every part of your email, including subject (some providers only encrypt the body). They’re also rolling out post-quantum encryption of email data at rest, which tickles my crypto nerd side.

They’ve still a loong way to go to match Proton’s product suite though, as they only offer Email, Contacts and Calendar for now. They’re working on Drive storage next, which is the main reason I currently use Proton.

Of course. I have nothing against Fediverse server admins setting up a Patreon —ideally Liberapay— or something similar to receive donations to cover running costs. I have and continue to contribute financially to indie devs or server admins when I can.

Not everyone will do that of course. But there again, running stuff at a small scale shouldn’t be crazy expensive either. The operational costs of keeping a microblog or indie site running are little to none. I host my blog and all of my side projects for free in a cloud provider.

Running a Fediverse server is more expensive. Last time I looked into what it would roughly cost to stand up a barebones stack to host a Mastodon server in a public cloud, it was like a hundred bucks a month. Not cheap but it may be big enough to house a couple thousand users. If at least 0.5% of your userbase donated some money to cover running costs, you might be ok.

Alternatively, if you have a server lying around at home, loads of people self-host at home, which is a tad cheaper.

I’m not saying a fully decentralised indie internet wouldn’t have its shortcomings, of course. I’m just saying I’d happily take that over the current state of the web.

https://opentofu.org/

If you do, you wouldn’t need to stray too far.

https://opentofu.org/

Bring them back! I for one would rather use a forum over a fucking Discord server any day of the week. At least forums are open, searchable and discoverable. Good luck finding the answer to a question you have that some poor sod like you may have also asked in a Discord server months or years ago.

I’d say genuine. Genuine experiences. Sharing shit for sharing’s sake. Not for better SEO. Not for profit. Just unadulterated human expression.

That’s how I envision using the internet for entertainment in the near future. I’ll still use the shitty corporate sites when I must, for transactional browsing. I’m not going to pretend I can push Amazon, Microsoft, Google, online banking, etc. out of my life just like that.

But I will actively seek authentic spaces. They will be a tad smaller than your average social network, Reddit, and whatnot. But I’m certain they’re out there and more people will join me in this search and populate these small spaces as time goes on.

Lemmy, Mastodon, the IndieWeb movement. The first steps. I hope to find more!

Yes. Encrypting your entire hard drive has basically been a tickbox in the Fedora installer for a long time now. No reason why I wouldn’t do it. It’s, easy, doesn’t give me any problems and improves my devices security with defence-in-depth. No brainer.

Feels good not to care anymore about the unrelenting enshittification of Reddit, Twitter and Google since I switched away from them.

Not that there’s anything wrong with people wanting to learn mandarin but I wonder whether this uptick in engagement with the Chinese world will just be a blip and soon people will get bored of it and look for more “Western” platforms again.

Like, when the enshittification of reddit and Twitter took root, you would also see very big numbers of users flocking to alternative platforms like Lemmy (like yours truly!) or Mastodon but in the end, after the initial novelty wore off, how many of those people actually ended up sticking around or moved on to something else after a short while?

My point is that it is still way too early to judge whether RedNote will become the next TikTok in the US, or whether this could be the start of a mass grassroots movement for American and Chinese people to get closer.

I can’t comment on its server use cases or exotic workstation setups with RAID, NAS, etc. but I’ve been running Fedora on Btrfs for quite a few years now and I’ve had zero issues with it. Am I deliberately using all of its features like CoW, compression, snapshots…? No, but neither would your average Linux user who just wants something that works, like ext4.

I don’t miss ext4, Btrfs worked for me since day 1.

Is Shotcut any good? Why would I pick it over Kdenlive?

Yes.

Just use Google Docs then. Yes, it’s Google. Yes, it will somewhat tie you into their ecosystem but Google Docs are free, get regular updates and are pretty good overall. I’ve been using Google Docs for many years now. I occasionally use Office365 for work and Google Docs is just as good, if not better.

Nope, don’t rotate passwords. Just don’t. Best case scenario, you’re wasting your time; worst case, people will actually make their passwords less secure by rotating them, e.g. some people would happily change “password123” to “password1” and call it a day.

Just pick a looong password once, make sure you don’t reuse it elsewhere, and you’ll be fine.

This is as per the NIST latest guidelines.

The article addresses this point.

This change is justified by the fact that a user can simply log out and view another user’s posts anyway. Except that’s not entirely true. Since Elon Musk took over the site, being logged out of X makes it very hard to view a user’s profile, individual posts are viewable but viewing an account triggers a log in pop up.

So technically it is possible for a logged out user to view your tweets but it’s a lot more inconvenient. Anything you can do to make it not worth their while helps.

With this change they won’t even have to put any effort anymore to stalk your content on X.

I know of a better way still to protect yourself from stalkers and trolls on X.

Quit X.

And my bow!

X11. Luckily those days are over thanks to Wayland but, Jesus, are X.org config files a fucking, fiddly PITA to configure!

Don’t confuse authoritarian regimes with fascism. China is an authoritarian state running a diluted version of communism, but it’s not fascist. Russia under Putin is leaning more towards fascism these days for sure, but they’re not fascist outright yet.

Maybe what the hexbear folks gravitate around the most is the idea of authoritarianism. The flavour doesn’t matter as much.