And yet?

Mastodon is full of actual conversations between people. Someone says something. Someone else replies and an actual conversation happens where people respond to each other.

Lemmy? It almost always devolves into people trying to one up each other and aggressively talk at each other. It is like we speed ran reddit and went from “How dare you have a different opinion” to “I am going to cherry pick a sentence and build a whole fucking straw city from that”.

Honestly?

I vastly prefer almost everyone I have interacted with on mastodon over basically every lemmy user. Because lemmy still thinks it is reddit but also is totally over their ex but do you think he is thinking of me and can I send him a picture of your dick to show it is bigger?

Whereas mastodon? People kind of just want to talk. We largely understand that twitter has been a shithole for… most of its existence. So rather than try to reinvent it (bsky and threads) we are learning from it in the same way cohost learned from tumblr (and died even faster…).

And the lunatics who need to scream about what federation is and why it is The Future? They aren’t talking about basically anything else. They are keeping to themselves and talking about how amazing the community can be… while the rest of us are actually being a community.

Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.

Back when there was any question of what platform to migrate to? Threads and bluesky were “Get an invite and make an account”

Mastodon was people insisting that EVERYONE needed to understand what federation is and the underlying philosophy. When really they should have just said “Sign up for one of these instances. It is like email where it doesn’t really matter what provider you have”. Countless times I tried to explain to folk on a message board or discord and would say “Just make an account on one of these four or five instances”. And, like clockwork, someone would “well ackshually” me and insist that people can’t use Mastodon without understanding the fundamental concept of federation and how picking the right instance is important and people can just delete and remake their accounts until they are satisfied.

So when it was time for the big influencers to move? They went to where people were already congregating and where they didn’t need to host an educational seminar to tell someone how to make an account.

Just to expand on the phone thing because it amuses me:

In a past life myself and a few others had access to cell tower records for a specific company. As a research project, we applied what we would now call AI/ML concepts to sanitized data (basically all customer IDs were mapped to a different ID set and then the mapping was thrown away).

For poops and giggles I checked the tower nearest the local happy ending massage place. And, lo and behold, we were able to immediately get a list of everyone who turned their phone off for 30-60 minutes.

The fundamental issue is still giving people a false sense of security. It is why it is INCREDIBLY important to be very very specific about what you do and don’t get from various actions. Otherwise you have the same problem as all those people in countries where being LGBTQ was criminalized who realized elon musk owned their DMs.

Also: Putting your phone in a farraday bag half a mile from a protest doesn’t take much effort to detect.

1. So how ai generated is wired these days?
2. NEVER trust any guide that is about “protecting yourself from government surveillance”. Anyone who has an idea of what risk mitigation is viable will NEVER phrase it that way for obvious reasons

From a quick skimming, it looks like their genius guides boil down to

• SIgnal: Signal is only as secure as every user in the chat. Yes, it is MUCH better than using something like imessage. But if they are beating your buddy with a baseball bat it doesn’t really matter if your message expired or not
• FDE: Yes, that is a good idea. But understand that “oh, I forgot my password” doesn’t work when you have been declared to have no civil rights because you look foreign.
• Get a NAS: A good idea, in general. But maybe understand that means you have a big ol’ box of incriminating info in your house that is available to whoever has a crowbar.
• Use Tor: HA! First, it is only a matter of time until Tor is attacked and likely large numbers of users are brought up on CSAM charges. But also? Understand what a compromised endpoint is and maybe look up what governments tend to be associated with those.
• Get a VPN and turn off your GPS: Yeah. it is a real good thing that our devices don’t all connect to cell towers where they can easily be tracked from.
• Get certain crypto but carry a lot of cash: Yeah… how AI generated was this article?

If you actually care about your vulnerability, look what ACTUAL journalists on the run from a government or megacorporation do (dedicated hardware that can’t even power up within a few city blocks of your other devices, for one). And understand that most of those boil down to “They know it is me and they are hunting me but I can live off the grid long enough to get this story out and then maybe they won’t kill me afterward”.

You should not be touching your mirrors or seat while driving. That is what you do before you leave the parking space (… or at a red light).

Good call on the windows and gear (although… there are arguments that you don’t need to in an automatic) though. Forgot we live in a world where teslas are street legal.

I think, in general, the shift to having MOST functions be on the touchscreen is a good one.

When driving? You should generally only be futzing with (off the top of my head):

• Windshield wipers
• Climate control
• Not the music but let’s be honest here
• Turn signals and headlights

And the rest make perfect sense to keep behind menus you deal with when you are parked. And with modern cars, climate control stops being about balancing the knobs and becomes about setting the preferred temperature and MAYBE tapping the defrost/circultaion button. Which actually also makes sense to not need direct button access.

But yeah. Still 100% need physical buttons and knobs for the rest.

I think it is Subaru who have the big display screen and then a small row of dedicated buttons below it?