ggtdbz

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/49033194

Sorry if this is not the high brow discussion this com is for.

I travel a lot between different countries in the Middle East which have restrictive laws, and I live in one that is slowly becoming more competent technologically. I have to stay for an extended time in different places, so I’ve been connecting through always-on VPN out of the same place and it’s been working fine for now. But Digital ID laws are quickly going to close things off from me.

My risks that I’m trying to avoid are as follows:

I’ve just been permanently using a single reputable VPN and single exit city for all of my traffic for the past while. Digital ID laws in the UK and EU will make this increasingly infeasible and I will probably have to exit out of somewhere new like Switzerland. I don’t know if those servers might be more trouble due to increased abuse for example.

Just want to know how others are dealing with this. Is just stomaching the wave of verifications after logging into all my emails from a new country the only price to pay? Is the world going to shit and should I rethink “just” using a VPN? Is it VPS time now that more and more things are being blocked from VPN access? Do I give up on the internet a decade ahead of schedule and chop wood in the woods until Israel’s AI mistakes my shack for a children’s hospital and drops heavy munitions on me?

I’m really hesitant to start using two sets of devices, some for insecure local traffic and some for encrypted traffic. I don’t think carrying like four laptops through airport security would keep eyes off of me.

While most of the technical solutions suggested by the replies in my original thread are probably good for different use cases, I'm just chasing the original high of the anonymous internet of my childhood, I just want to blanket route all my traffic through one place and not have to think much about it. Too naive? I'm sure. But I have no big threat to worry about in my scenario, at least now. This is just basic I-want-to-network-out-of-view-of-ISPs.

My main exit nodes have been in the UK, since that was a good compromise between the US's wild west privacy/surveillance and not being blocked by US stuff that wasn't GDPR compliant. I know the UK was never the bastion of internet freedom, but it was a practical option. Especially getting English-as-default for everything, which is something I missed. When the internet went hyper-mainstream in the 2010s, I was no longer getting a standardized English internet like everyone else, I got a localized badly-Arabic-translated version that assumed I want the strictest filtering on everything. Moving over to always-on VPN has made me feel like I got something back. Especially now that ISPs around me are no longer as careless as they once were.

Now the UK is introducing digital ID, and services have started to comply. I'm not a regular Reddit user, but I still would like to access the site without sending them a selfie (or my ID, of course). Nexus mods is enforcing this now as well, and while I haven't used it in ages, it's still a big public repository of stuff I'd want to go through at some point. Digital ID really goes against everything I believe about the internet, this concept of me being on the same anonymous playing field is directly under attack from laws like this, and it is fueling a lot of tech doomerism thinking inside of me. The last thing I want is for an any account of mine, regardless of how infrequently I use it, to be permanently blocked for lack of ID. I know we love our piracy here, but I am a Steam user as well, and with the amount of money I've put into their service (and how much I use it), I would have no choice there. But that's the only one, I think.

Someone in the thread suggested Singapore, I was thinking Ireland or Switzerland, as good exit node countries. Ireland has only two Mullvad servers (which is a problem). Switzerland I'd think would be very popular with scammers. And Singapore would, if nothing else, make my terrible ping even worse.

There's also the fact that a lot of things are now getting blocked more often from VPN servers and it is pretty annoying. Random Imgur links and so on.

I know this is more of a meandering rant than a pointed question, but I just want to hear some of your thoughts on this.

For the first time in two decades of my tumultuous relationship with the coldhearted mistress that is Microsoft Windows, I am glad that it turned itself on. It didn't update itself. It didn't even bluescreen for no reason and update itself in its confusion.

The torrent finished downloading about an hour before I got home, and by the time I noticed it finished, the elusive seeder was long gone. I feel oddly at ease. I feel oddly... responsible. For propagating knowledge to future seekers.

Is this dull enough for here?

Have this terrible photoshop bodge job as an offering of my goodwill.

It would be funny if this ends up being an unremarkable movie.

The image has stuck in my mind for what must be two decades now. Is this familiar to anyone? And should I even bother watching it? We all know of movies that peak at the moment you notice the poster, so...

This is a bit of a lower effort post, heads up.

I've always tried to be a bit less pessimistic about trends and platforms that are irrelevant to me. For a few years now I've been a bit apologetic when friends in group chats described TikTok as some kind of digital disease, for example, when they share some kind of egregious screenshot. I didn't use it, I didn't plan on using it, but I wasn't going to fault people for using internet platforms that they clicked with. I remember similar arguments about platforms like Pinterest, DeviantArt, or Tumblr in the past. Like they weren't for me but I got what they were going for there. They served a purpose, and they had a certain culture that was usually catalyzed by the platform's features.

My patience has been wearing thin, and the catalyst for it has been the nonstop torrent of what is affectionately being referred to as "AI slop" by the kids online. Every element of personality and personal escapism that seemed so foundational to the idea of cyberspace (remember the word cyberspace?!) is being mined and then worn down to dust in the pursuit of a nonsensical internet whose only interesting concepts seem to flourish in spite of the current trend.

I remember when things started transitioning from text and images to more usable video. Being in a part of the world with exceptionally bad internet, the video revolution was kind of a step back: video just took forever to load. But video was also more personal, and amateurishness was harder to cover up in a video than in a blog post. There were so many weird accents out there, regardless of English proficiency, that gave every clip of someone's voice a sense of place.

I only write this to contrast with the absolute hatred I have for AI-generated voice overs for slop content. I absolutely abhor the grating, EQed-for-loudness, syntactically perfect AI voiceovers I hear from people around me scrolling through short form video. This is a fucking waiting room, put some earphones in or do literally anything else. That type of voiceover really really gets under my skin. Robotic TTS was bad enough, but there is a "yuck factor" for me when a robotic voice feigns emotion or personality. It makes me think worse of whatever's being narrated. I cannot stress how much cheaper the average piece of internet "content" feels now that everything is gated behind multiple machine learning black boxes.

My internet upbringing came about a bit earlier than people my age. We still had dialup until around 2008 where I am, so until that point the internet escapades I was able to go on were quite limited. The bandwidth was extortionately expensive, and it was hard to check much out since we were still quite reliant on the landline for actual calls. It was only when the DSL came about in a few years (which we are still on... thanks third world!) that I was able to properly "surf". (I'd quite taken to the term used in French media for internet users - "Internautes" - basically like astronaut but for the online world... It carries a fragment of this sense of wonder I am chasing now. Cooler than "users" who "surf").

I loved the early web. 2010 or thereabouts was hardly the golden age of the web, of course. Web 2.0 was well underway and I was really exploring the recently-vacated ruins of an age in decline. But I loved what I saw. I would Google something that I wanted to know about - let's say, Windows keyboard shortcuts after a typing error and a subsequent eureka moment - and I'd click on what seems the most interesting. While I'd now look for something like a Microsoft help page, Reddit post, or a Github-hosted text file for such a query, I clicked on articles (I think the main one was from Lifehacker?) and naturally, blogs and personal pages. I remember discovering what gifs are and for the first month or so after that discovery I exclusively thought they were used for MSN emotes. "Dragonball Z emoticons animated gif" was probably my most searched query in like 2010.

I was never a blogosphere guy but I loved old hacked-together HTML personal sites. Sure most people were using Blogger or Wordpress (at least most people I could reach incidentally through tangential searches). I still return to Skytopia every few years, and sometimes write something in its now-desecrated guestbook. I'd found it while just looking for "3D fractals" online.

I have a few scattered memories that I look back upon fondly. I got really into origami and then papercraft models, for a duration of time that I can't quite remember. I very vividly remember stumbling upon a link to this model in a list of papercraft links, one cold winter. It was in an unremarkable HTML table list, that contained other, less impressive models. I still used that PDF's password as a sort of catch-all, basic zero-security password for years after finding this model, despite never putting in the effort to actually build it.

I'm rambling (I am full of too much alcohol and cheese as I'm still on vacation) but the point of this post is that I don't feel this way about the internet at all anymore. I don't feel like sitting in front of the computer and "experiencing the digital world" is giving me any escapism or inspiration, and it hasn't in a very long time. This is even worse, considering how much more time I spend now on an internet-connected anything now. Back when I was feeling the most connected to a bunch of cool scattered nerds online, I was spending a few hours at most every month in front of a web browser. Now it's multiple hours a day, split about evenly between business and pleasure. At least, pleasure in intent. The experience itself has been less than pleasing.

One step afterward was the early app age on iOS. It might sound very bizarre for the older and/or more privacy minded, but early app platforms were mostly populated by curious early adopters. Right before microtransactions and subscriptions absolutely blew up, these online communities were a small microcosm of the wider internet that skewed a little younger, and it is a strange thing to feel nostalgic about. My point is that there was some magic left in there. The main platform I have in mind is a defunct little proto-Discord (all groups were publicly listed with various privacy configurations) called Groupie, that was full of a very odd cast of characters. Of which I was one.

I don't know what I'm trying to say here. My post reads like old man yells at cloud, only the Cloud is a meaningless term and I'm by no definition an old man. I just miss the internet being magical. I'm sure there are parallels to people missing curated print media, missing having more options for quality (arguable) live television, missing the zeitgeist being transmitted through radio. I can't deny that there has to be a nigh-opaque layer of rose tint making this era of the internet seem like it's more than it was. But it meant something, dammit. The uncensored, fully customizable and unapologetically crusty looking personal pages carried a promise of some kind of techno-utopia that never happened.

A few months ago as I was looking back through the documentation for IndieWeb, this personal blog was linked. I got a tiny hit of that internet euphoria, in a weird way. Nothing about how this person seems to post their location appealed to me, as someone in a tiny country the size of a shoebox. But most of the early internet involved stuff I wouldn't do, so - experiencing things I dislike about modern social media but in the milieu of a personal website was a nice compromise.

What really got me was everyone's favorite article I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again. It is a generational piece of writing that I will treasure like the other Fediverse darling, Cory Doctorow's Tiktok's Enshittification. Alongside the Reddit exodus of 2023, these really made me feel like I could be doing more to interact with the side of the internet that is still trying to be more personal.

I have a bit of internet doomerism left inside me, even knowing about initiatives like IndieWeb. I'm fully aware that the early aughts web aesthetic and culture explicitly arose from the disconnect between people and the limited tools the average person was willing to wrap their head around. It's very different to now, an era where I find myself disgusted by people formatting videos that will only circulate among friends in a closed group chat in the same way that an Instagram video would be formatted, practically looking like an advertisement in terms of pacing... Like the main goal of being online is "content". We all have our own rant about the word "content", so I won't rehash mine right now - especially after writing this whole rant post.

I just hate how everything is converging into the very thing we complain about AI slop outputting. Garbage out requires garbage in and I can't help but feel like we are increasingly encouraged to create, gargle, and consume garbage, from even before this current era of machine-generated slop.

I wish I had a positive note to end this on. I don't want my writing to be whiny screams into the void. But at least it's my own writing - and unfortunately, the bar is just getting that much lower. I feel like I need to apologize for insufficient editing.

I originally posted this to my personal blog. I try to post better stuff on there than this, but hey - if I only posted posts that were perfect, I'd post nothing.

The issue is that I think there are Steam bundles that can’t be gifted, such as the Valve pack and that kind of thing. That also makes something like Civ 6 less likely, just because of the DLC bundles. I can also use Fanatical or Humble but frankly the region thing might be an issue.

This guy has played every console-available game under the sun before around 2020. So I’m focusing more on what he’s not likely to have played. He’s more of a soulslike/fighting game guy and I’m more of a simulation and eurojank enjoyer, so the recommendations don’t always carry across.

That said, I’ve been thinking newer games like Animal Well that are sure to be received well, but it’d suck if he already played it on something else. Would be a funny inclusion as well, a 35 megabyte 2D platformer for his new gaming desktop.

Any suggestions?

Hi everyone.

I’m on my work computer on the perennially terrible Lebanese internet, in a relatively safe town. I’m talking about some stupid client KPIs in a meeting with a bunch of people around the world. An “important” meeting. The clients assume I’m in Dubai or somewhere like that, and I don’t correct them.

I’ll get asked “How are things in Lebanon?” by some coworker in Dubai or Europe after the call and I’ll say the classic “Alhamdulillah, my family and I are okay.” And we’re safe, we haven’t been bombed, not personally. I am lucky to work with decent people, but how could they understand. Will HR give me shit if they learn how much time I’ve spent out and about helping move essentials to shelters in the “dangerous outside world” instead of just burying myself at home “until it’s over”? Maybe I can get fired for putting myself in danger. Or maybe they give me leeway as a relatively senior person with the best English in my team who they get to pay less than everyone else because I don’t have a French passport - what a steal! (They pay me okay, and quite well compared to others around me, but we all know what this arrangement really is)

But corporate work, in normal times, rots the soul from the inside out. This is worse. I have to stare at the bad screen for hours while the EMTs dig people from under their homes. I have a duty to at least try to help my people, but I can’t. If I quit my job, my family loses this home and this security, and we have no place to go now that our original town is being bombed. I don’t come from money. I can’t just move or buy a house abroad or even a plane ticket (Lebanese people with no other nationality can’t go many places without a long visa process). I can’t “just move to Europe bro”, I can’t “just move to Dubai bro”. I have responsibilities. I’d love to move, but I can’t. Maybe I should.

Naturally, even nice coworkers cannot comprehend this. Besides, they need my input on the KPIs. This client is very important and number must go up after all. I hear another thud in the distance, through the crickets, I feel it in the pit of my stomach. Not close enough to threaten my life, but close enough to understand I might be next and that no area is truly safe.

This isn’t a woe is me post and I don’t want people in the comments feeling too sorry for my situation yeah. I still have my family, four limbs and two eyes, my home, a source of income in actual usable currency. Save your real sorrow for the people who have lost more both here and in the occupied territories. It could have been me in Gaza, it could have been you.

Please donate to the Lebanese Red Cross if you have the ability. Our people in the orange jumpsuits are our pride and they need everything they can get, especially now that they’re being hit as well. Relatively transparent and reputable org with boots on the ground and a functional donation platform, please consider helping.

Been thinking of making a post like this for some time, apologies if some of this is not completely relevant: this community seems more like it's about Reddit the platform/product than Reddit the social "thing", but I'm sure a lot of people have similar experiences to mine. Maybe on some instances more than others.

Here's the one of the last comments I wrote as a regular Reddit user, on the eve of the blackout (almost a year ago to the day), under a post titled "Will your participation in Reddit change":

Reading through this is a bit funny, in retrospect, seeing how Reddit-centric my understanding of the internet had become at the time. I am happy to report that I have checked the home page maybe a half dozen times since the blackout, instead of once or twice a week like I expected. I suppose the disgusting state of the heavily astroturfed worldnews sub was a big part of it as well: for me Reddit was the one big online platform where the average visible user didn't seem to be very misinformed about Palestine (at least not by default), and it was frankly very sad to see where it got in the past few months.

I do miss Reddit, I haven't been able to replace it outright. I'm from Lebanon, and Lebanese Twitter is (if you can imagine it) even more of a toxic cesspool than regular Twitter. I'm not on Facebook (also cesspool here), I'm not on Instagram - my point is I don't get anything about my country on ostensibly user-curated social media. /r/Lebanon was very far from perfect, but it was nice to get a trickle of local news with users who were more in line with my own politics. The local news outlets focus on a lot of irrelevant crap, the sub's news feed was a bit more interesting.

One thing I loved about that subreddit was that users with more mainstream views in my country (eg. transphobia-as-default) were allowed to spout their bullshit in the subreddit with little mod pushback (if it's just JAQing off etc, not harrassing people obviously). Then the regulars would dogpile on that user's post - very refreshing! And very validating I would imagine for anyone who is used to hearing this shit everyday.

I was applying to be a mod to help keep the sub moving, at one point, but hey. Maybe that headache was never worth it. Still, I felt like I lost one of my online homes.

More generally, I have enjoyed my first year on Lemmy, although the experience has been lacking in many ways. For one, while Reddit has a reputation as a meme cemetery, the memes here are generally a bit moldier. But that's okay. The fact that there's fewer posts I think isn't necessarily a bad thing either, I think we all preferred Reddit's slightly slower homepage in 2013 than the one we left in 2023, that would regurgitate more and more from the bottom of the barrel if you were willing to keep scrolling.

I've toyed with opening a Lebanon community here on dbzer0, having opened one on FMHY that nobody used. But it wouldn't be the same, and I wouldn't know how to populate it. I posted maybe 2 non-question posts on Reddit in my decade+ of being a regular user, but I wrote tons of comments. It also helped keep my English sharper, I think.

I've reactivated my old Instagram account and it's pretty ass out there. The ad/post ratio is just egregious, and they'll just serve you random posts from random pages. I want to see my friends goddamn it, isn't this what your platform is supposed to be for? For those of you who don't know, the app will also send you a notification once or twice a day suggesting you look at "today's top reels". I have never watched a reel of my own will, fuck off.

Point being, the main platforms people use online haven't been up my alley. I can only hope the zoomer dumbphone pushback keeps expanding, and that social media starts being seen as something for older generations. Wishful thinking?

This is just a post about enshittification, everyone's favorite word, but every time I think about it for more than 2 minutes I can't help but miss a simpler internet. Some part of me was hoping it would kickstart me "growing out" of spending this much time online per day (not everyone spends a ton of time online), but it hasn't.

Also every time I ask something longer than 20 words on Discord some middle schooler will reply "yap", even in the channels designated for questions. Discord has had its uses (yes I know there's privacy concerns), but it's hardly a replacement for Reddit, or forums. Both of which are/were searchable. But enough yapping from me.

Thoughts? How has the exodus been for you? Is this how Digg users felt?