left me stunlocked with this one icl

on the surface they do a lot right. warrant canary, no logs, solid infrastructure, profitable.

for me, i really don’t like the weird ways that they market. super misleading to imply that they make a person “anonymous” and/or greatly improve your privacy beyond you sending them your information instead of your isp. i also really dont like the lack of transparency, particularly with closed-source clients. i also really don’t like the number of controversies that nord has been in, even insofar as getting hacked. i don’t want my vpn provider to have any, let alone quite a few, of these controversies.

in terms of the model, proton is transitioning to a non-profit which reinforces why they are so well-regarded by the community. long history of doing right by consumers, where it matters most.

my bad, i misunderstood. thanks.

i don’t think we disagree in a vacuum but bringing that up in the context of this particular thread is probably unhelpful

beehaw is a safe-space, we shouldnt villify the experiences/needs of people who need alt-text. this could be game changing for people who need it.

so cool man, thanks for sharing this

i doubt you’ll get banned lol, it’s probably not that deep to the admins.

if anyone is concerned about it, just open the instance ToS and ctrl+f “name”. im sure it’s not important.

i think you should read the replies to the hackernews post, there’s some interesting discussion there with more nuance. particularly the thread started by user “kens”

not to come off overly negative- steve also does great work. i hope we hear from LMG soon <3

not to cast doubt on anything he says here, but steve has increasingly been making ‘dunk’ videos for the past year or two. i feel like his channel has been trying to find (or create) exposés, because those are the videos that pop off. starting from the video of that NZXT case that caused fires.

again, not to cast doubt on the experiences of billet labs, but i question steve’s intentions in presenting this. i hope this discussion doesn’t end up revolving around gamers nexus.

i just tried this and got a more fence-sitting result of “here are the pros and cons, there should be public discussion before we know if it’s good or bad”.

but your result is fascinating.

youtube music shilling incoming, ignore if dont care :p

awesome if you’re a spotify user, but to anyone on the fence, youtube music is just so much comfier. and if you’re a privacy advocate or anything adjacent, i’m sure you’re still using youtube in some way anyway so you may as well cut out spotify, another exploitative company, and just leave yourself with youtube.

there are plenty of free services that let you convert spotify playlists into youtube music ones, and you can listen to them using mobile frontends like InnerTune or web frontends like HyperPipe. free offline listening, no ads, good frontends, it’s just comfy and you can cut out a dependency on spotify. besides, if you do end up ever trying to export anything from your spotify (playlists, downloading songs, etc), chances are it’ll use the youtube api anyway.

it’s comfyyyyy

to answer your other questions, i do have a used pixel with grapheneOS now. much better phone, much better experience and much better piece of mind. i use a good all-covering case so nobody asks what phone i use, because i’d hate to be a billboard for google.

the biggest selling point of the fairphone for me was its’ unique form factor. i was asked what phone i had A LOT. when i took the back off, people’s mind broke. this created a segway for me to talk about right-to-repair with people who otherwise would have never cared. it’s a great tool to open discussion into ethical hardware and software. i miss having those conversations as regularly as i was.

i wrote this comment on another post recently, i think you might find some value. the thread has some good discussion. note that i regret using a fairphone, but i dont regret supporting the company. in a ‘lesser than two evils’ sense, fairphone is MUCH less evil.

the fairphone company makes grand promises of 7 years support, despite historically really doing 2-4 years of support very badly. to the point where when the fairphone 4 released, it was going to take so long for it to make an android upgrade that a FOSS group CalyxOS ended up making the port for them. being this late for security and feature releases is insane, especially when they make claims outside of SoC OEM support periods despite knowing that they can’t provide those updates. the fairphone 3 even launched on the same day as android 10 but instead of quickly porting over, they instead ported over their next line of phone (fairphone 3+)

the phone removed expandable storaged and a headphone jack, with obscene pricing for storage upgrades and at the same time as they released their unrepairable line of wireless products. this is just begging for e-waste.

the claims of being ethically sourced are not universal to the whole phone, the fair trade gold standard is limited to some parts that they source.

they have hardware for an extra SIM slot on the fairphone 4, but made it unusable to the user. clearly just an anti-consumer move.

there are other reeasons, and you’ll also notice im not providing sources here. a lot of this is readily available info online and frankly im tired, i hope you can search these things up yourself if you want to confirm. i’m saying these things in good faith if that makes you feel more comfortable. there are reasons to consider the fairphone, but know that if you’re doing this for a ‘long-lasting’ phone, then you’re only getting that on the hardware side and even then you’re vastly overpaying for the value of what you receive.

i still support fairphone in their journey to making mainstream fully modular phones with readily available replacement parts and open schematics. as a big ‘fuck you’ to smartphone producing companies, the fairphone does its’ job magnificently and provides an excellent example of why samsung, apple, google etc are lying scum when they say these things aren’t possible. if a small company like fairphone have been doing it since their infancy, we shouldn’t believe that big tech can’t.

EDIT: i was wrong about the expandable storage, please read replies to get see some further discussion.

i’m half way through reading only but this is such a cool resource, thanks for sharing. strongly recommend actually reading it, for anyone lurking.

that’s beyond my ballpark, i’m not a software guy so i only ever contribute money. this page is on their website, maybe give it a look and see if anything seems doable to you.

https://wiki.lineageos.org/contributing

e-waste is unethical, try keeping your phone if you can. keep an eye out for LineageOS and see if they end up making a port for your device. if your plan is to de-google your life, stock android can also do that just fine for you. iirc, there are no google services on stock android.

i stand by my comments about fairphone. there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. if you are dead-set on a new device, look into getting a used/refurbished pixel phone and installing GrapheneOS. you won’t find a more private/secure phone mobile system, it’s vouched for by Edward fuckin Snowden. try get one of the newer models (6 or 7 series) because you’ll get longer software support life.

the fairphone still isn’t a bad option if you want the hardware to be as ethical as you can realistically manage, fairphone uses several fairtrade gold sourced parts, has open schematics and is almost fully repairable. just bear in mind that it is not designed to last on the software side and fairphone’s priority is straying towards profit; it’s the ‘lesser of two evils’ in my mind, i guess.

idk if you’re familiar with the ‘reddit hack’ when making searches online. basically, you add ‘reddit’ to the end of your search and you’ll get a list of reddit posts discussing the thing you’re looking for.

i want a ‘lemmy hack’ to replace this, ending a search with ‘site:beehaw.org’ or ‘site:lemmy.world’.

this only works if people ask questions for people to answer, so please make posts if you have any questions during your privacy journey. you’ll be building the foundations for lemmy to fill the void reddit once did :)

i think you’d get a lot of value from searxNG. it’s a customisable search engine that queries results from dozens of search engines, and you have full control over which results you see. you want google results AND ddg results? that’s awesome. but you just want yandex results for image searches? that’s fine too!

i personally use https://search.bus-hit.me/, but you can find more here.

i can see on your profile that you’re 17, you’re awesome for taking these things seriously so young. it gets a chuckle sometimes when people see no google apps on my phone, or a different search engine when i look something up. if you hear any laughs, just know you’re on the right side of history :p