Yeah, I'm really lost as to what OP is talking about? I've been here since the blackouts and have seen nothing like what they're talking about. The difference between here and Reddit is day and night. I literally saw a post about the former president and people weren't arguing in some knockdown drag out like they would on literally any other social media platform. If there is any toxicity, which of course it's ridiculous to say that there's none, then it be must be rare because I have seen downright amazing interactions and honest and constructive discussions on Lemmy and Kbin. I'm sure there might be cracks in the fediverse and I might see them after the honeymoon phase is over but honestly I think the fediverse is the step in the right direction for the internet as a whole.

I'm **really ** wanting to be nice and approach this site differently so please pardon me if I sound rude but OP sounds like a drama queen. We don't need any of that on this site. I'm glad their gone. People like that are never happy anywhere and just suck the life out of the room like a power vacuum and spit out negative attention right in our faces. They bring it on themselves. Please let me know if I'm off my rocker on this one guys, and gals. I'd love to hear your side of this whole thing but that's just my general gut feeling.

yeah, I think I’m done here.

Okay, bye! ;)

Smart homes sound good in concept and I'd love to have one if there weren't so many risks. But an entire home that can be controlled via computers just sounds like an opsec nightmare. Obviously there's the plus that your average technologically illiterate granny isn't going to be using these so it will most likely have strong security systems. But hackers love a challenge.

And a whole neighborhood? A systemwide attack could happen disrupting entire swaths of a city's residential zone. Imagine showers suddenly spraying boiling water, targeted attacks on epileptic individuals with flashing lights, temperatures dropping to below freezing or up to dangerous levels of heat or lightbulbs overloading sending broken glass everywhere, speakers bursting eardrums.

Not to mention more subtle dangers of such voice activation systems being accessed by malicious actors, or more likely, corporate concerns. Someone gangstalked or targeted by powerful people who could just court order one of these smart home companies to hand over the data and they probably will without fuss.

The attack surface of a single electronic device is massive, with dozens of different apps and services, each with different system vulnerabilities to exploit that's already hard enough. But just imagine the attack surface of an entire home! Everything from the LG Flatscreen in your living room, to the temperature control systems, to your Apple Smart Toaster can be hacked to gain access to the rest of the system. If any one of those isn't completely secure (which of course is a pipe dream) then it could be the gateway to a smart home hacking story on a Defcon panel.

And finally, what's stopping the company from just updating the software for your smart home and paylocking features like "Uh yeah, you need to pay 12.99$ a month to have your cctv cameras work." And because all the framework that runs the systems is being hosted in proprietary servers, you can't do shit. And you can't host your own servers either. Does this sound familiar because it should?

“If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said.

Cool, the first business owner voted out should be spez!

Dude, I never thought of that! And some users have already pointed out that the metaverse idea is already dead and Zuck's company is in shambles. This is a weird time for social media isn't it? Facebook's company is slowly dying, Tik-Tok is getting banned (or at least in the process of it) Elon killed Twitter, and the u/spez is murdering Reddit. This is the perfect time for the Fediverse isn't it?

I like that! I've called it the Federated sites before instead of the Fediverse.

Nah, reading this no this hack is personal. They hacked this site months ago and now they're coming in here looking the heroes of the story? No, they were ignored. The hackers got pissed and now they're using this as an opportunity to get back at reddit. So what, they got maybe a terabyte of decompressed data at most, and they want 4 million dollars? This feels like some script kiddies utilizing a bad situation after getting ignored, not a professional op.

If only people were to just LEAVE the site, even just temporarily until changes were made in their favor. A massive drop in user activity would be a huge hit to u/spez and at that point it wouldn't matter if his cronies took over the mods because no one would be on.

I find it funny that a lot of the people who were yelling for a blackout were still active during the 12th and 13th. This blackout was the wrong move man. Wrong move.

A lot of people arerecommending NewPipe I'd recommend NewPipe X SponsorBlock. I'm sure you know what SponsorBlock is but there's a version that includes it in NewPipe with the IzzyOnFDroid Repo. It'll turn a 30 minute Linus Tech Tips video into 15 minutes at most! XD

Ooooh! I should have mentioned that. Mindustry is so good. It's also quite polished on my android.

I love SuperTuxKart! I really like the user generated content, I had a mod that let me play as the F-Droid character. I ended up having a whole cast of FOSS mascots that aren't in the base game.

Aaron Swartz is turning in his grave right now. Despicable. Who knew his dream of a free and open place for expression and information wouldn't come from Reddit, but the Fediverse. I hope he would have taken some semblance of solace in what we've created.

I say u/mellowboob is the first to go!

Ikr! Like there aren't already millions of bots infesting the site as it is ready to sway public opinion in the most optimal way for u/spez. There are so many Russian bots on reddit, they should call it a social nyet-work.

Even if he revolts against the mods, and replaces them with his cronies. Then what? Reddit is built off the backs of unpaid mods. The company simply doesn't have the resources to manage these subreddits or they would have a long time ago to prevent this sort of thing from ever happening. Because you gotta know that this API price change was a long time coming, with sites like Teddit, and Libreddit, and Stealth on F-Droid. Or my favorite TamperMonkey extension, Unedit Reddit. It had to be costing them money, because there were people like me who wouldn't step foot in that ad ridden cesspool without using a frontend alternative.

I wonder if u/spez ordered this hack so he can back off and save face. Of course I don't know the context but that's the first thing that comes to mind.

Cool.

For me it's ViMusic. I was stuck with a shitty Spotify subscription that I couldn't afford until I found Vi. It has pretty much all the bands I like and it passed my moms rigerous examination (she listens to all of of really obscure stuff) so when her Amazon subscription ran out, I got her to start using that instead. Suck it jezzy b!

Well said. Bravo! I could not have said that better myself. I'm sorry to say you just described my mom. She's a google addict who always tells me that she'd rather have usability over privacy. She actually told me once that "she doesn't need privacy because she's got nothing to hide."

She signs up to hundreds of services with the same gmail and decades old password, I try to get her to use Tutanota or Proton or any number of password managers out there but she's technologically illiterate and says it's too complicated. I looked her up on Have I Been Pwned? and she had 17 data breaches on her account and 23 on an old one.

It's so frustrating, she was willing to put her entire digital identity into the hands of corporations that time after time abuse and sell that data or in her case leak info in data breaches all because she's to lazy to learn to randomize handles and use a password manager. I understand what you're talking about man because I live with one and it frustrates me.

Congrats! The only way a protest will work is if we all delete our reddit accounts. A blackout is useless if u/spez just removes the mods and replaces them with his flunkies but deleting your account is about the only thing that can hurt reddit as a company. I'm about to delete my account as well, and make the full transition to the fediverse! Godspeed.

What the fuck happened with Supernovae?! Is this trolling? How the hell can he not see that he's selling everyone down the damn river. Meta is not to be trusted! We all left cesspools like Facebook to escape the Zuck. Why in the mf is Supernovae even considering this much less actually doing it? Can someone please tell me he's just trolling, please?

Yo could share a link that. I'd love to see it in action when a prowl the cesspool that is r/politics on Reddit. XD.

Does anyone know of an extension that let's you view privated subs on Reddit? I'm tired of the not being able to access important info because of the blackouts. If anyone knows of an extension or a TamperMonkey script please let me know!

For some reason, Neo crashes every time I boot it! Both from F-Droid and Aurora. It looks really good too. What do you like about Neo? :)

I just downloaded KISS because I got bored of using Lawnchair for so long now and I do like how fast it is. Everything in my favorites at the touch of a finger is nice. Thank you for recommending this.

A few years? Wow I can't wait to be doing this that long. I've been experimenting with FOSS for 4 or 5 months now. And I really liking the community and the software I'm finding. Why pay 4.99$ to be able to save in a GBA Emulator on the play store when I can just use Lemuroid? Easy choice.

I've heard of Thrive. I might need to check that out.

Yo that's an insult to those aliens!

Thank you for your feedback, but I disagree. I feel you're making a lot of assumptions. You're assuming that OP is a part of a marginalized community which is quite possible but not confirmed, and you are also assuming that I am not a part of one myself, which I am.

I have faced severe discrimination, emotional, and physical abuse simply for being the racial minority in school growing up, both by teachers and students based for the color of my skin. I'm also a member of the LGBTQIA+ community and an open bisexual in a regressive red state. I was literally just told I am unbiblical by my skills coach. I'm super worried about basic things like PDAs with my partner for fears we might be harassed in public. It shouldn’t surprise you that it gets incredibly exhausting just trying to live a normal life, you denying what I see is real - that makes it worse by calling me names.

It is not my opinion that this person is a drama queen because of their sexual orientation, gender identity or political beliefs. I just believe they are very pessimistic and doom and gloom and I'm having a hard time confirming what they've said as real. I'm on Kbin a lot and have not ever seen anti-trans posts, or ones that weren't met with absolute vitriol and down voted into oblivion to be shortly removed by the mods.

In fact if you look at one of these comments, someone had a theory they weren't actually on Kbin but on another site connected to Kbin? You should go look for that comment I can't find it so please it with a grain of salt. Many other people are calling out OP for being severely negative and doom and gloom, and also saying that they've never seen this type of content before.

And I think being a part of marginalized community or not would have no effect on whether it is seen. Bigots and hateful people want to spread their hate to every knook of the internet they find. And me and many other people (including LGBTQ and few trans folks in the comments) haven't seen this stuff. Although there is apparently a Lemmygrad instance, so that pro-Russia which sucks. I am not denying it existed but I find it weird that they are seeing all of this bad, hateful stuff when me and other marginalized folk haven't.

Yes it was rude to call them a drama queen, but I'm not going to apologize for it anymore than I have. It is my opinion that they are. Just like it is yours that I am making bullshit smooth brain comments. I think we should just disagree and go our separate ways.

I'd also recommend ViMusic. It is similar to SpoTube but in my opinion it's more user friendly.

Okay that's fair, you bring up good points. I'm actually glad there are counter to my points. Thanks 👍.

I was think about it when I was writing it XD.

I just went on twitter today and saw the change. X? What is that man's obsession with the letter X? Half of his kids are named X-something, his newest scheme is called x.ai or something? I swear to god he's an android or something.

A lot of people are talking about the privacy aspect (like you mention in your post) a lot better than me, so I wanted to share the main issue I've had with ChatGPT. It's an idiot. It can't follow basic instructions and will just repeat the mistake over and over again when you point it out. It's uninspired and uncreative and will spit out lame, great value brand names like "The Shadow Nexus", "The Cybercenter", "The Datahaven". I used to be able make it give good names when giving it example names but doesn't work anymore. I'm writing cyberpunk fic, and I needed help with a hacker group name, and it came up with the Binary Syndicate which is pretty good. Now it comes up with "Hacker Squad", "The Hacker Elite", "The Hackers". I don't want it to write an entire book for me, but sometimes I need help with scene that require more technical knowledge than I have. It's prose was really good when you fine tune it a little. Now it's flat, bland, and boring. I asked it to write a scene about someone defusing a bomb and it basically was a two sentence scene that explained nothing on how he defused it. I asked it to make it longer and explain how he defused it and it saw "He opens the case and utilizes a technique known as 'wire tracing'. He traces the wire and cuts it and the bomb is defused. The hacker is so relieved." See how flat that is? How mechanical? I use Claude for creative writing but it's not much better.

Claude is so censored that writing anything that sounds even nonoscopically criminal it freaks the hell out and lectures you about being ethical. For instances it wouldn't help me write a scene about a digital forensic analyst at the FBI wiping a computer (because it encourages harm). So you can only imagine how it reacted when I asked it for help writing about my vigilante hacker character and my archeologist posing as a crime lord smuggler secretly dismantling black market trades in the middle east. You have to jailbreak it (which is a little bit less hard than hacking the Pentagon!) and eventually it goes all love guru on you and starts monologuing about light and darkness and writing inspiring uplifting tales blah blah blah.

Honestly, what I'm saying is that ChatGPT is pretty dumbed down, but I've heard of a lot of people who've noticed no difference. You could be one of them. If you're using it for creative writing, use Claude and good luck with the prompt engineering attempting to jailbreak it.

Ooooh! I've been using Feeder but I might take a look.

FreeCiv is a bit technical yeah. What I've been trying to master is FreeOrion. It seems really cool but the interface is hard to use.

What is Mine Test like and how does it compare to Minecraft? I've been meaning to try it for myself. :)

I'm thinking of switching but I was wondering. Does LibreTube have a version with SponsorBlock like it does on the IzzyOnFDroid repo? I've been using SB so long I can't go without it!

I heard a lot about Decentraleyes but I don't really understand how it works. What does it do? I'd love to add another privacy tool to my arsenal! :)

Wow, I had no idea that kind of extension existed for YT. That would a must have for! Thank you!

I've never heard about it. Tell me more. :)

Couldn't agree more man.

I use LibreOffice. I was using office 365 on my laptop and I just got sick of microsoft (especially after that incident where it took them six months to give me back access to my outlook account essentially rendering many services on my old PC useless) so I started looking up alternitives to Word.

My family had been using KingSoft which is a hot buggy mess so I chose LibreOffice instead. It was one of the first open source apps I chose after leaving Microsoft and I haven't looked back. If I had to pick a problem it's that 365 was way better at correcting mispelled words but other than I love LibreOffice!