What pissed me off about reddit is how it fingerprinted your machine.
If you don’t know what that is, be scared. Be very scared.
That meant if some power-mad admin lording it over some subreddit blocked me for petty reasons, it would be easy to get all my other 6 alt accounts permanently banned.
F YOU for that, reddit.
Found some anti-fingerprinting defenses, which protect me at other sites, is the only silver lining.
Never torrent without 1)a VPN, one that 2)gives you a dedicated IP.
A VPN is great for most things, but not quite enough for torrenting.
This is because (everyone please correct me if wrong) torrenting is peer-to-peer which means that someone seeding to you can see your real isp-issued IP address. They can contact your ISP and whine about you.
If some copyright guardian sets up a honeypot, they could get your identity even if you use a VPN.
The solution is to use a VPN that gives out a substitute IP address they own (and therefore keep private) which then redirects traffic to you.
There may be better ones out there but I haven’t bothered looking ever since I signed up with privateinternetaccess and use their “Dedicated IP” setting.
Not just that, but if I have a question about, say, Linux scripts, then I have to search fifty fucking communities names c/Linux in fifty fucking instances to find a solution.
Just because an instance has the biggest community doesn’t mean it will have an answer. So I do have to look at fifty fucking instances.
I haven’t seen a single viable argument that justifies this irritating and inconvenient situation except i LiKe fEdErAtIoN.
And for the federation fetishists, yes you can have federation AND one single c/Linux across instances.
If you don’t want to read Linux tips from lemmy.naziLinuxUsers.com then just block that instance like you would block a nazi individual on reddit.
This problem is so ridiculously easy, but for some reason the mediocre status quo always has its ardent defenders.
“That’s the way of the world” is usually said by Ayn Rand types who don’t care about anyone else or know how to make things better.
Also, they paint the questioner as some nutter obsessed with finding every single byte about a topic.
And, no one is “stuck” on anything, we notice a defect and want to find a solution.
So think about this. Suppose you’re making a community for, say, Ukrainians who have taken refuge in the USA.
What kind of person shrugs off their need to find each other and says “Suck it up buttercup”. Or makes fun of them for asking.
Yes, there are inconvenient and irritating ways of handling the problem. Shrugging it off just tells me what kind of person you are, but it doesn’t improve anything.
Now, what we could do - crazy, I know, hear me out - is think of a way to conglomerate all the content from diverse instances with different policies into one community where anyone can hear everyone else.
Two kinds of people in this world. The ones who start asking mocking questions, and those who put their heads together.
Oh, I saw the futility of talking to them lonnnnnnnnng ago. You might as well try to convince a christian that they’re wrong. You know why that is? Because they’re both cults.