This will have no effect on torrenting or other P2P protocols. Your IP address will still be out there.

I’ve never heard of DMCA warnings based on DNS requests. That doesn’t really make sense.

Yeah, Matrix is a very, very hard sell. I mean, “normal” people (for lack of a better term) are put off by Mastodon, and Matrix is a hundred times more complicated to join. I’m also not sure what it would look like to use Matrix the way I use Discord. Perhaps there is functionality in Element/Matrix I have never explored since I use it more for messaging and group chat, not for communities with multiple channels like IRC/Discord/Slack.

In any case, Discord is too entrenched to be replaced by something that is merely technically superior, or even more user-friendly. Realistically, you can’t migrate entire communities if they’re bigger than a tight-knit IRL friend group, and even that is hard. That seems to be the only reason X still exists.

Almost, yeah. Certainly the big corps.

This is why I strongly favor services that use end-to-end encryption or do not store history in the first place.

There are not many times when I’ve needed to search back through history on a Discord server, and every time I have I thought to myself “this would be much better on any platform besides Discord”. Discord would, IMHO, be a better product if they did not retain history forever.

Ditto for Slack. Slack has the additional gall to limit access to that data unless you pay for a premium plan, despite the fact that they keep the data forever regardless (as evidenced by their occasional free trials which magically bring all history back, and some search tricks you can use to access old posts regardless).

Both Slack and Discord have lulled their user base into a false sense of privacy. Nothing you post there should be considered private.

It doesn’t really matter if they do or don’t. What matters is that they can change their TOS at any time, they keep an archive of all historical data, and you will have pretty much no recourse no matter what they decide to do with it in the future.

Who knows what will happen to Discord in five or ten years?

They might get bought by a narcissistic billionaire.

They might sell all their data to Google for training AI.

They might go bankrupt and sell off their assets to the highest bidder.

They might have an IPO and begin the usual value extraction at the expense of their users.

I know, I know…crazy ideas, right? When has anything like that ever happened?!

I try not to judge people…unless I see them right-clicking to copy and paste. Ew.

This is good advice, because email is very difficult to make reliably private. However, it’s not the best you can get. Tutanota, for example, stores headers with E2EE, and still has a search function.

The goal should be to make it as private as it can realistically be. Ideally, any cloud service you use should only store end-to-end encrypted data.

I’m not trying to shit on Proton — it’s a huge step up from the popular mainstream email services, and the inclusion of cloud storage makes it a much easier transition than going piecemeal with 2-5 different services.

Not the encrypted mail, mind you, because they can’t do that

Just want to point out for anyone new that ProtonMail does not use E2EE for email headers. That means they CAN access your subject lines, to/from fields, and other email headers. That means they CAN be forced to hand it over to the government.

Source: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained

Subject lines and recipient/sender email addresses are encrypted but not end-to-end encrypted.

Personally I am disappointed in a lot of Proton’s wording about this. They frequently promise they can’t access “your data” and “your messages” when they do, in fact, store potentially sensitive data in a format they CAN access.

Using an ad-blocking DNS server solves most of those problems. Mullvad offers a public DNS server with no account required, but there are plenty of options out there.

You should still use a browser extension on top of that for pattern-based URL blocking, but a DNS-based blocker should be your first line of defense.

A good ad-blocker goes a long way. You can block all Google domains with minimal impact to non-Google services.

It’s incredibly annoying, but it gets easier over time as you fill out you whitelist.

One of the big advantages to something like NoScript is that it lets you enable scripts only from certain domains. So you can enable the functionally-required scripts while still blocking other scripts.

But yes, it’s a giant pain in the ass. It’s absurd that the web has devolved into such a state.