For me, companies includes Cloudflare, Google, Amazon and Meta, and my primary goal is anonymity to them (rather than security). So no, Tor and Tor Browser is not overkill for these companies.
comfy
joined 3 years ago
Well I've been doing it for years and have no idea who Bazzell is ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The US is one of the least peaceful states in the world, and that's no easy feat. Plus, they are openly involved in the proxy war, as opposed to China.
I'm not seeing the hypocrisy here.
Something that hasn't been mentioned yet: sometimes an instance blocks another, but you may still want to see and reply to their users in a community used by both instances. Having your own instance gives you more control over which instances to federate and block, if there isn't an instance which is already aligned with your attitudes.
I'm not a fan of pets, and beyond that especially non-native species, but if I were forced to choose, I'd be partial to cats. But maybe that's from a lack of experience with any dogs that aren't too loud and heavy to handle.
It's not been something I've felt a need for here, but I understand that it can be more useful in some communities.
I come back after a couple of weeks and we've quadrupled at least. It comes in waves, and now I'm thinking it may not stop (until some reddit staff make their own BlueSky equivalent, of course)
Tor Browser, because my threat model is passive surveillance capitalism so anti-tracking is important.
Else, Firefox (vanilla).
Yeah, it's especially hard with social media, where a lot of their value is only because your friends use it. And your friends use it because most of their friends use it. So without a big event that shifts whole communities over, it can be unreasonable to expect people to "just move", as much as I'd love that to happen.
I have mixed feelings over faulting users for the sins of the service provider. I know that not everyone can care about everything, politics gets complex very quickly, but users are exactly what gives the service power. So I do fault them for continuing to use it. If a reasonable alternative exists, I think it's important to stop supporting a dangerous company and to help start alternatives. Otherwise, inertia will just prevent any good changes.
The replies already here have touched on the most important factors and why they matter (it's open source under AGPL and it's decentralised, the core devs are ideologically anti-capitalist so they won't go public or sell out to advertisers, the users are the primary stakeholders)
But they haven't mentioned an issue with this question: we are a community. What could WE do to about becoming the next Reddit after a decade?
Most important? Get involved. Acknowledge that volunteering and donations are powerful! The best thing you can do is to help the devs, whether it be coding, translation, documentation, web design, or the many other things that help this place thrive. I see all these posts saying "Lemmy should make onboarding easier!" as if approximately two people are there to do all the work.
I'd say it's a mindset of coming from sites where you don't have the power and the only path for things to happen is complaining to the higher-ups. Being open source and community-driven are things new users need to understand. We may well be their first experience on a non-for-profit social media platform, where we don't have a designated full-time tech-support team, or a professional dev team of dozens.
Yes, if you create a community, you are responsible for helping it grow. This includes things like writing a useful sidebar and adding an icon image.
The good news is, you can (and usually should) ask for help and recruit moderators to help you with this.