Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
The web is decentralized, social media, which is a small part of it, just isn't. (Which consumes loads of traffic)
Technically true, but in practice, it's very vulnerable to conglomeration of power by a few. Social media, for one: it's not exactly a matter of quality to get users to use your platform. Beyond a certain threshold of minimum quality, people use and stay on a certain platform because the people they know are on it, such that it becomes a chicken and egg problem. Other than that, Google have such a ludicrous market share of web advertising (which unfortunately remains the primary method of monetising the web) that it's very difficult to not use Google's advertising, giving them immense power to surveil and monitor people. Google Chrome, which remains the most popular browser for reasons that elude me, has so much sway over the internet that it had the courage to even propose the idea of WEI. The infrastructure on which the entite internet runs are controlled by just a handful of massive ISPs, yet another centralisation of power.
To be clear, Fedi is basically the opposite of private. Every post you make is archived on some 25k servers. Even your DMs.
Also it's entirely dependent on your server admin and what kind of info they are collecting.
If you want private social media, Signal stories are pretty much all we got, to my knowledge.
Isn't blogspot a centralized service?
No, WordPress and Blogs can be federated, lemmy.world is becoming a centralized service...
The UI for different Lemmy instances sadly is ass. Such a bother to navigate this space, also with the constant federating and federating ...
Most lemmy instances have the same UI and most people use apps for lemmy...
Also you don't have to worry about federation, thats for your instance admin (Wintermute) to worry about. If you want to be federated with basically everything Shitjustworks is your choice
I do have to worry about federation of my instance mods decide to have a feud with another instance where I subscribe to subs. Also the UI is wonky for linking to different instances, like I'm never logged in when clicking on a link to a different instance. It's just very crude right now. Plus discovery is kind of a pain, topics get spread over different instances...
What's the Fediverse Snap/TikTok alternative?
There is none yet that I know of.
But I think something has to be said as well: the problem with copying to the T the most popular social networks is that those are designed to be deliberately predatory and addictive, many parts of their design is implemented in alternatives without even thinking what it really means for the users, because it has become second nature to us and they also feel good, but are mostly detrimental exactly for that and I'm the first to say that I keep falling for it, spending hours on end on my phone. Think infinite scrolling, instant notifications, etc.
While it's good to have the option, if we want a healthier social media experience, it doesn't suffice to decentralize it, we also need to think of at least better defaults, then let the users decide for themselves if they want a more addicting experience