I don’t think there is any way to have a genuine “open forum” amongst complete strangers. There have always been human troll farms pushing narratives using sock puppet accounts, AI is just enabling it to reach new scales.

I actually am for echo chambers when it comes to social media, but one in which you only follow people you know or trust and ignore complete strangers and to make sure you get news and critical information from OUTSIDE social media, again with institutions you trust.

Well from personal experience with a small website the biggest things you have to deal with are web crawlers trying to vacuum up every last ounce of data they can find and web crawlers trying to find obvious backdoors like trying default WordPress logins (even if you’re not running WordPress). Make sure your software is properly configured and up to date and you’re safe. Some isolation is still a good idea but don’t lose sleep on which one because they’re all still overkill in this case.

On the other hand if you’re running a service that would be actively targeted by a large government enforcement agency or some other very wealthy and highly motivated entity, then complete physical isolation would be the only acceptable answer but with even more protocols to prevent contamination or identification as there have been attacks demonstrated that could infiltrate even air-gapped environments and that’s assuming you could hide it well enough for them not to just come physically compromise it (without you even knowing).

Keep in mind if you want to use any of these technologies because you want to learn them or just think they’re neat, then please do! I suspect a lot of people with these types of home setups are doing it mostly for that reason and not because it is absolutely necessary for security purposes.

I just run Docker and my router maps ports to it. Container isolation and a basic firewall is more than enough for me.

Like are we talking what’s good enough security for hosting an anime waifu tier list blog or good enough security for a billion dollar corporation?

They only have to moderate content from users on their server, and the idea would be that only CBC employees (or programs) would be given accounts which also verifies they are legitimate. Readers subscribe to those accounts from their own instances.

It’s the eternal cycle:

• Small platform has quality experience because most users are genuine and engaged, and user base is too small to be “worth it” for corporations and trolls
• Platform grows slowly until it reaches tipping point of popularity and network effect
• The platform has explosive growth, drawing interest of corporations and trolls
• Corporations enshittify while trolls crank out misinformation and rage bait
• Users reach tipping point and leave large platform to smaller platforms that don’t have corporate interests and trolls
• Repeat due to network effect

Encrypted data. Could be backups of important service details in case all their servers are seized, leaked or sensitive data they are holding as leverage, or a private porn collection. Nobody knows until they release a decryption key.

It’s convenient timing that Google Chrome is removing support for ad blocking plugins like uBlock right as Premium sneaks ads back in… 🙄

It’s not a “community”, it’s one person making all the posts because I guess they wanted to make hating Linux their entire personality. 🤷

The call screening is done on-device, but if you flag a screened call as spam then you get the option to send the recording to Google. I’m guessing those get fingerprinted and then used to detect spam when screening other calls.

https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9094888?sjid=10078269796479391373-NC#zippy=%2Chow-call-screen-works%2Clearn-how-call-screen-protects-your-data

There’s an even better way to handle spam calls if you have a recent Android phone: use the automated call screening. Every time robocallers hang up immediately before saying a single word because they know if the person flags the call as spam then Google now has a recording to automatically flag future calls even if they spoof new phone numbers.

When did people stop wanting to learn anything? Everything has to be dumbed down to the level of toddlers otherwise people can’t be bothered.

To me the fediverse is great because you need higher than a room temperature IQ to use it so the posts are already far greater quality and the interactions are more meaningful than any other social network. Meta can keep all the screaming adult children in their platform.

To make it the same as Pascal’s Wager. Many religions have a “reward” in the afterlife that strictly includes believing in the deity. It doesn’t matter if you follow every other rule and are an amazingly good person, sorry, but if you were an atheist or believed in another deity then you will be punished eternally just because of that. I guess all-powerful, all-knowing beings have incredibly fragile egos and AI wouldn’t be different. 🤷

If anyone is looking for an alternative firmware, check out Fresh Tomato: https://freshtomato.org/

Telegram requires a phone number too? I mean yeah there’s the option to use that blockchain phone number service, but you can do the same for Signal. 🤷

I barely watch YouTube as it is. Sometimes I have to watch a tutorial or review that I can’t find information on elsewhere, but literally every time I wish it was a blog post instead.

I’ve started using Obsidian with a kanban plugin, though any sufficient kanban style solution would work. I have a to-do column (aka backlog), an in-progress column, and a finished column. I add notes to the cards about what I did and I never delete stuff from the finished column so I can review if I need to re-open or re-do a task in the future.

Yes, I said in my original comment that it can’t universally parse and validate every HTML document. If they’re older pages that don’t do lots of crazy formatting then it’s not too hard to use regex as a first pass then take a second pass through the results to weed out the odd stuff.

I guess it depends on your definition of “parse”, but let me tell you it’s still very painful to deal with things like attributes appearing in any order inside of a tag so I definitely am not advocating to use regex to “read” (or whatever you want to call it) HTML.

I use regex in SQL to parse HTML stored in a database. It can’t universally parse and validate every HTML document, but it can still be used to find specific data like pulling out every link.

Those examples are all forms of linking back to the content which is still hosted by the original server in which it was posted. Effectively they are sharing links to the content over the content itself, because if the hosting server removes the content then it is no longer available through those other mediums. And yes there are caching mechanisms involved, but those fall to the personal use case because the cache is not made publicly available.

For these bridge services to work, they are creating and hosting duplicates of the content. That is the biggest difference. If BlueSky actually federated then they would not be rehosting the content either.