This has been my experience as well. In the past friends and family were more reluctant to break away from whatever their default communication app was. These days most people are already familiar with the idea of using one thing to text, another to “message”, and often more than that. I’ve had great success converting people to more secure platforms now that they understand the process.

Tech is a boogie man to many executypes. I’ve seen plenty of IT pros that were in over their head but smooth enough con men. If they keep coming up with things to throw money at/trim money out of convincingly they have long and successful careers.

Enjoy training on my -checks notes- DELETED POST HISTORY YOU FUCKING CLOWNS.

Stay ForeverFucked™ spez.

And this is why you VPN.

Disclaimer - Spend your money how you want. Use what works for your needs and moral standing. This post is a data point for consideration, not an endorsement.

I use Kagi with the unlimited search paid version. Whether it’s my own needs, friends, family, etc, I always seem to be the one doing the searching for everyone I interact with. After years of Google feeding more and more sponsored links into the results I switched to DDG, and after about 6 months of finding their results lackluster I tried Kagi.

For me, it works. I don’t know that I’ll use it forever or anything but at the moment it does a better job of getting me reliable results within the first few sites and I can move on with my day. I just need quick, accurate search results. So far Kagi has been that.

I did the free trial thing a couple times to see how it worked before paying and I’d suggest that to anyone thinking about switching. Give it a week or two on trial accounts and if it sucks then it probably isn’t for you.

Greed knows no bounds.

This must be true since I read about it on the line.

Apparently you haven’t seen him attempt to wear cowboy boots.

I’ve been to several coffee shops through the years that also had local artists that helped with the decor, and local musicians playing a couple days a week.

For whatever reason I’ve never really looked at a coffee shop as a bar/pub for daytime folks but I guess that’s what a lot of them kind of were.

Strange, my reddit account seems to have had all its posts and comments deleted and my IP leads back to Proton. Oopsy daisy. Get fucked clowns.

Good to know. Fuck both companies.

HP flashing that ink subscription money around.

Fuck it we’ll fix it in the future.

Meanwhile, LOTR nerds:

A Subscription Is Required to Continue Reading

Interesting.

First of all apparently ublock, no script, or some combination of my add-ons kept me from seeing the message and I’m able to view the entire article.

Even more interesting is this text at the end of the article-

This story was originally published by Grist, a nonprofit media organization covering climate, justice, and solutions.

So this source basically spun an article from Grist and put it behind their paywall.

Following the link from Scientific American, the first line of the Grist article is-

This story was co-published with WIRED.

It’s clowns the whole way down, yaaaaar.

You’ve been hacked. Pay 500 BTC to regain control of engines and landing gear.

We have a great tool to automate the automation.

We have the idea of a great tool. Right now we’re kind of square wheeling our way through it.

If it does I’m not aware of it but I’d love to learn of one.

It would be nice to have the option to not just block your data from being accessible to a 3rd party but also feedback junk data into the system. Pollute the data stream until it’s no longer useful to the powers that be while still retaining functionality for the user.

One can dream.

If I did that I’d feel obligated to remove the user accounts I’ve blocked from my list before posting it and frankly that isn’t worth the time or the trouble since I’d have to manually recheck all the accounts to see why I blocked them. No thanks lol.

I think it’s pretty easy to replicate what I did with minimal effort though. All I really did was change the ‘all’ page in my Lemmy app (Boost) sorting to the newest posts. It becomes obvious pretty quickly when a couple communities have 4+ most recent posts, by the same accounts, etc. Most of the bots that exclusively repost reddit content are very obvious with just a couple clicks.

Once I had the worst offending reddit reposters blocked I noticed certain community/instance/users were either spamming content I’ll never care about or were NSFW bots, or were too region specific, etc. so I blocked them too. I spent a day or two doing more blocking than browsing.

After that I changed the sorting on the ‘all’ page to active posts, which at that point was mostly posts by real people again. From there I’ve only had to block the odd account here and there like I would on any other social platform. Every so often I’ll notice a bot post that’s slipped through but if the community is active someone else has usually posted something similar that’s getting more interaction anyways, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out on much I’d be interested in or the stories that are actually newsworthy.