Worse, but I think a big part of that has been giving myself the space to have those sensory response moments, and just like understanding myself better, being more patient with myself, stuff like that.

Amazing! Thanks so much for the info!

Syncing freetube with syncthing?? I use both of those, but I didn’t know there was some way to keep freetube synced across devices. What does that setup look like?

Not going to lie I found it to be quite mid. I’m sort of tough to please when it comes to horror, especially supernatural horror, so take that with a big grain of salt. From a technical stance it is a fantastic piece of cinema, the filming itself, the sound design, the pacing, like it’s there, but I found the plot lacking in ways I won’t explain due to spoilers. I’d say it’s worth seeing on the big screen, and I’m so glad the crew is seeing such big success from the film, but it didn’t quite live up to the hype for me.

Not a proxy, but cryptpad is a fairly good alternative.

I’ve been toying with a “Pay Per View” model for a bit. But it’s sort of modified.

Basically you can “pay what you want” on a per view basis. You as a user get to decide how valuable your view is and pay a creator that much each time you watch a video. Maybe this gets linked to watch time somehow to avoid people just spamming short content. YouTube presumably gets a cut to keep the lights on.

Creators making actually good content will hopefully attract viewers willing and able to pay, and viewers that have the means and really like a creator can up the amount they are paying. This could be on a per channel basis, or just a blanket setting of I pay someone ¢10 a view or something.

Idk, seems like a bit of a silly idea now I type it out

I think I know two Destiny 2 streamers that have mentioned it. That’s about it because that is the only online “competitive” game I play. To be clear, I daily drive it for all the other protections it provides. Mullvad just struggled with speeds when I gamed, so I couldn’t just leave it on. Proton didn’t have a noticeable impact so I could just leave it running.

There’s some games that use peer to peer connection that can expose your IP if the person on the other end cares to do the digging. In some competitive games people that are trying and caring way to hard will use this to say DDoS people in order to win games. While I’m probably not good enough, or well known enough for people to be doing this, you’ll hear streamers mention it happening to them every now and then.

Ha!! You’ve triggered my trap card. Now, I turn Special Interest face up and it uses its ability Info Dump.

Bad jokes aside, I’ve done a good bit of research and fiddling in my own time to try and put together a more digestible guide to some privacy and infosec basics. I’ve got somewhat of a background in tech/computers, but I’m coming to the issue as more of a layperson than a lot of the talking heads are. My express goal has been to demystify digital security in order to make those tools more accessible, particularly to overly surveilled minorities. I’m going to shamelessly plug my own website with my writings on the topic, but I’ll also give a condensed version here.

Basically I went through each service I used that was any of the following:

• a paid service
• a “free” service requiring an account to use it
• a service owned by any of the large tech corps

And then researched how to replace them with privacy respecting alternatives. Here’s what I’m using to replace the core functionality you’d expect from, say, the google suite. Gmail, drive, passwords, ect.

Let’s start with email as it needs a little discussion with it. First and foremost, if a service is “free”, you are the product. Just having you signed up for Gmail is making google enough money to offer you the service for free. Between scanning emails to train AI and selling your personal info to advertisers, google is making all of the profit it needs to operate Gmail “for free”. With this in mind I strongly, strongly, encourage you to PAY FOR EMAIL. Hell, just in general try to form a new found appreciation for well made, paid software. I realize not everyone is in a position to pay monthly for something like email, but this way I know the company is making all they money they need to from actual paying customers.

I personally use Fastmail, but Proton also has a pretty good reputation and offers some other products with it.

“Cloud storage” also needs a bit of a breakdown. In my opinion there is no such thing as a “private cloud” that isn’t entirely self hosted. If a company is offering you a “private cloud storage” option, free or otherwise, you have to remember that you are putting your data on their computer. That data is theirs now. There’s a hard drive somewhere in a data center with your data on it a government agent could go take. Or the company itself is just doing whatever they want with your files. That is not private, at least not relative to you. I suppose it’s probably private between you and the company, but who is to say where bits and pieces of your data are being sold.

My solution isn’t really a cloud in the usual sense. I use Syncthing, which just keeps files in sync across devices, it does not provide a lump storage solution to offload data from your devices. All files are present and take up space on each device they are synced between. I personally prefer this, but I realize the functionality is different. If you really need to free up space on say a phone, you can set up things like one way sync, but I would look into NextCloud if you have a computer you can set up as a small home server.

Everything else I can kind of zoom through.

For passwords I suggest KeePassXC with the password database shared across devices with Syncthing. I personally use a command line based tool called UNIX Pass, but I’m not sure I’d suggest it to everyone.

Messaging is in a bit of an odd place right now, and basically if you seriously need secure messaging assume any “app” or even remotely mainstream messaging platform is insecure compared to the truly best options, but adoption is a big issue here. You could pick the best, most secure messenger, but that’s not helpful when none of your contacts use that service. Signal, Telegram, Matrix ect. are all pretty decent and have different perks, but if you’re seriously concerned you should be looking into different tools and protocols entirely.

Finally, get a VPN. This is another example where you should expect to pay a few dollars a month for this, else you’re probably just feeding data to a honeypot. Mullvad is basically the standard at the moment, but I also keep a Proton VPN account active as I’ve found the speeds to be much better for gaming and such. I’ve got a Mullvad account I keep handy for special occasions. Much beyond that and Tor becomes necessary.

Even just a good ad blocker, Ublock Origin, can go a long way.

I think those are some of my go to starting points, I go into much more depth on a lot of this and more in the link below.

Arkhive Digital Footprint Post/

I daily drive Proton mostly because of speed for gaming, but I keep a mullvad account handy for special occasions. I have zero interest in the full Proton stack, I don’t want to centralize my data like that. Especially once they joined the AI train, I’m glad I kept my VPN and email separate.

I host my own private git server and use Unix Pass for my password vault, FastMail for email, Syncthing and SMB for file sharing, don’t really use crypto so I couldn’t care less that they added a wallet. The VPN interface on mobile and Windows/Mac is fine. I’d love to see the Linux options improve, but I just use OpenVPN profiles and it works well enough.

I was recently home and I put a sharpie censor bar across my chest in an old photo that was on my parents fridge. Other than that I try not to interact much with them.

Honestly you’re right. At least as far as calling out some of the more wild or poorly worded parts of what I said. That being said I never said reform and incremental change hasn’t helped, only that plenty of incredibly important societal changes have come ONLY after extreme conflict. Of course decisions have been made entirely peacefully, but saying humanities progress hasn’t been violent is a gross mischaracterization of our collective history.

As far as dying goes lol. I said willing, not wanting to. I say that because I realize my willingness to participate in the large scale restructuring, that many believe is necessary, could put me at risk. Hell even just existing as a trans person puts me at a lot of risk let alone being politically active. Between my hobbies and living in a car centric society, I have had enough brushes with death to truly not fear it, and that has honestly changed the types of futures I can imagine. Those futures are more radical, and involve more personal risk, but also have even more wonderful outcomes than any involving the slow burn legislation solutions. The current system IS bad for the vast majority of people, on both sides of the isle. If someone feels otherwise they are in an incredibly lucky position.

Tons of the deaths you mentioned in your first lines did lead to change, and I don’t think I need to paste a list of political figures, throughout our history, even just within the last century, that died for a cause that went on to be successful, even leading to precisely the legislation and incremental change you speak of. Hell even just the killing of average citizens can and has sparked massive moments of political dissent and subsequent change, see the BLM movement as an example.

I’m also by no means using this as an excuse to not participate in the political system. My primary point is instead that I want to also take an active part in making meaningful change within my lifetime, ideally even sooner as I would like some time to enjoy said change before becoming old and decrepit. The political system gives myself, and plenty of other people, no hope in seeing that drastic change in our lifetimes.

Additionally, history is written by the winners. Many of the people that died along the way often get conveniently left out in order to make the history the winners write look even better. There is absolutely history of violence in the struggles unions face. There is absolutely history of violence in the civil rights movement. There is absolutely history of violence in the “charter of English liberties granted by King John on…”

In each of these cases the “reform” you mention has taken serious struggle and sacrifice to get people to actually begin to realize something needs to change. From the incredible violence of colonialism the Magna Carta represents, to the blatant police brutality of the civil rights movement, to the numerous violent crackdowns of union workers, all of the “incremental change” you reference, to me, seems so obviously too little too late. If we wanted to avoid violence tell that to the oppressors, not the people defending their existence. In fact each of the things you reference as being moments of reform almost directly follow huge moments of often bloody conflict. That’s like holding up the Treaty of Versailles and saying “look at how peacefully we got this written and signed” while hastily sweeping the carnage leading up to it under the rug.

The adding up of infinitesimal differences you reference rings just as true for direct action as it does for voting. Another person out at a protest is another pair of handcuffs the police need to buy, is another single use taser they need to fire, and in some cases is another magazine of ammunition they need to empty, all to support the fragile egos of the already wealthy and powerful.

To be clear, I would love nothing more than for the cycle of violence to be broken, but as long as the people in power see those that are different from them as a threat and a source of cheap of not free labor, there will be violence. People out on the street, and open discussions about political violence, are a natural response to oppression. It’s the body’s, the people’s, immune system responding to the oppressive force of an illness in the form of fascism, capitalism, and colonialism.

“In the real world” when applied to the discussion of online vs AFK spaces is a super slippery slope. Legacy Russell discusses this at length in their manifesto Glitch Feminism.

The reasoning here being that language like that is used to discredit and invalidate the usefulness of digital spaces. Tons of minorities rely on digital community to explore senses of self, identity, and political leanings. That is NOT to say Lemmy ISN’T a leftist echo chamber, but it should point out the problem with using its digital nature to discredit anything that is said here. Anonymity is a fantastic tool for world making, particularly black and queer futurism.

Getting more into my own opinion, I agree with the other commenter under your post saying rarely in history have the most pivotal changes come purely from “reform”. Our biggest leaps forward have largely been started my social/political dissidence, which was then responded to with policy changes. Political violence is perpetrated on minorities every day. Using the online nature of this discussion to discredit people that are pointing out that violence and saying pushback is necessary is just pushing many already ostracized individuals out of some of the only spaces they can be safe while discussing such sensitive issues. These spaces allow people to explore futures that offer them even a small sense of upward mobility and stability, even if that means a period of violence before they get there.

I am in fact willing to die for the futures I am capable of imagining. If the futures you imagine are based on slow, inter-generational change via the current political system that is allowed, and incredibly selfless of you. My only pushback would be to look at your own quality of living and ask how many people have access to similar comfort and stability and try to understand why some people might feel the political system has failed, and will continue to fail, them. Personally I’d like to experience at least a small piece of the futures I’ve imagined within my lifetime, and I have little to no faith in this country’s ability to “reform” it’s way into those futures.

Yes, exactly! Thanks for clarifying that for me!

30 is hurtling at me like a train, so may as well say my bit while I still qualify.

Learn to swallow your ego, and pride, and “seniority”. There’s plenty of people younger than you that are wildly intelligent and truly want to make the world a better place. Let those people take up space. Let young organizers spread their wings. Put your desires to be important aside and help empower the next generation. Feeling valued by the broader society and being allowed to be important can help young people participate and learn to socialize, especially with some of their formative years being ravaged by social media and Covid.

How to properly zipper merge on a highway.

ASL has made a shocking difference in my life, both opening me up as a more accessible person, but also finding a lot of use for it in my own file!!

I feel this. Just as I was beginning to more fully transition among my friends, things like name and presentation, a wedding came up in my family, so now working on getting better with some of my stuff has just been put on hold.

Okay, I don’t have a single book that perfectly relates to everything you said, but I’ve got a small list of books I that relate to transness and gender as a whole. I’m going to put them in a rough order of “approachability” with the first being a good primer to thinking about gender and inclusivity and the last being very academic and in depth historical analysis. All links provided take you to bookwyrm pages, a Fedi book info and review site.

I’d like to make it clear these are by no means the end all be all of books on transness. They are just the books I’ve read over the last few months. I’m not even sure how the broader community feels about all these books. I am recommending them solely because I didn’t actively dislike them, and in most cases enjoyed them, and they effectively got me thinking about my own journey and trans experience.

Beyond the Gender Binary

Real Queer America

The Descent of Man

Glitch Feminism (a personal favorite)

Black on Both Sides

Ah, so being on Hyprland means I can’t really gain access to this, right?