Spiracle

The solution I’ve sort-of found is to go to communities of Arch-based systems instead of Arch itself. The same solution should work in most cases*, and the communities are more newbie-friendly.

*Depends on how close to Arch the distro is in this aspect/subsystem. The Manjaro community is probably less likely to offer AUR based solutions, since the AUR can be unreliable/unsafe on Manjaro.

Yes and no. I’d prefer user choice/curating your own list of instance you interact with.

However, each community also adds further burden on moderation. The communities you allow affect the culture, and some are very clearly more trouble than others.

My current solution would be to have multiple accounts for different sections of the fediverse. Currently I only have a generic Kbin and a Lemmy account, but if you find a Lemmy instance that’s federated with the broader free-speech spectrum without just veering into insane territory itself, I’d be interested.

Kbin user here. It does not federate downvotes from lemmy. So far, I have a total of two (2) downvotes and every single interaction, including the one I got downvoted for, was quite positive.

No toxicity in normal interactions so far. The only (slightly) toxic comment sections were regarding meta topics of users complaining about toxicity elsewhere and/or wanting to defederate more communities. Even those discussions were nearly entirely polite and productive.

The only somwhat toxic topic I participated in was when one car-enthusiast complained about the fuckcars community and got called out throughout the comment section. Piling on like that was probably not the best way and they deleted their post some time after.

Finally. I haven’t seen a single positive use of these yet due to the poor performance. Only slightly more accurate than professors or lawyers asking ChatGPT whether something was written by ChatGPT.

Direct link to the (short) report this article refers to:

https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:vb515nd6874/20230724-fediverse-csam-report.pdf

https://purl.stanford.edu/vb515nd6874

After reading it, I’m still unsure what all they consider to be CSAM and how much of each category they found. Here are what they count as CSAM categories as far as I can tell. No idea how much the categories overlap, and therefore no idea how many beyond the 112 PhotoDNA images are of actual children.

1. 112 instances of known CSAM of actual children, (identified by PhotoDNA)
2. 713 times assumed CSAM, based on hashtags.
3. 1,217 text posts talking about stuff related to grooming/trading. Includes no actual CSAM or CSAM trading/selling on Mastodon, but some links to other sites?
4. Drawn and Computer-Generated images. (No quantity given, possibly not counted? Part of the 713 posts above?)
5. Self-Generated CSAM. (Example is someone literally selling pics of their dick for Robux.) (No quantity given here either.)

Personally, I’m not sure what the take-away is supposed to be from this. It’s impossible to moderate all the user-generated content quickly. This is not a Fediverse issue. The same is true for Mastodon, Twitter, Reddit and all the other big content-generating sites. It’s a hard problem to solve. Known CSAM being deleted within hours is already pretty good, imho.

Meta-discussion especially is hard to police. Based on the report, it seems that most CP-material by mass is traded using other services (chat rooms).

For me, there’s a huge difference between actual children being directly exploited and virtual depictions of fictional children. Personally, I consider it the same as any other fetish-images which would be illegal with actual humans (guro/vore/bestiality/rape etc etc).

Just a warning, some vendors sell locked Pixel phones, apparently. I remember seeing a bunch of very dissatisfied posts when it was new.

It is also not recommended to use 2FA on PC to verify stuff on PC. (Personally, I still do that for some stuff due to laziness, though…)

Basically, hacking/stealing one device should not be enough to get your stuff. Smartphones are relatively often compared to PCs. As long as you still have a secure password you need to enter, I wouldn’t care too much, though.

Unsure, and depends on what counts as “playing”. My brother got an old computer for cheap a long time ago. There was a floppy disc with a game on it. I don’t have more impressions of it than walking around in some weird geometry on the black-and-white monitor. Some sort of chess-board floor I think.

Truly gaming would probably be one of those small Tetris handhelds. I still have mine. Used to play for hours on car rides. Either that or Game Boy Pocket.

You get default access to the Google Play Store. It’s just that the Play Store is demoted from being an irremovable system app with all permissions to being treated as a normal app. Depending on the app/feature you want you may need to add a permission manually, but everything should work.

Here’s the original Techlore video Rossmann is referring to: https://neat.tube/w/gctuauB8TRVxCWjwdGWr8d

It’s been two years, so I’m not 100% sure, but I recall it being very detailed and convincing. Techlore’s main argument against using GrapheneOS is that “Leadership reflects the project.” Since the person in question stepped down, the project should be fine, now, even if that holds true. (Personally, I installed GrapheneOS despite that video.)

To get out of my bubble, I’ve also searched for a meta-video about the Techlore/GrapheneOS dev drama. I came to this frankly ridiculous video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjCM8srhTW4

I’m 7 minutes in, and having not seen Tom Sparks before, he pretty much ruined his reputation with me already. He tries find evidence of Techlore being toxic by searching for his own name. His “evidence” of toxicity is literally people saying that Tom Sparks has a bad reputation and that specific videos or recommendations by him are bad. Literal case of “all criticism is toxic”.

Later, I paused when he scrolled through the dozens of mentions he brings as “evidence”, and nearly everything is either neutral. Even the negative posts seem to be more about how is takes on various topics are, apparently, bad enough to become a bit of a meme.

Even his interpretations of what he quotes directly from Techlore are stretchy at times.

The fact that this is the supportive evidence of Techlore being toxic, my faith in Techlore being a good creator is fortified.

Doesn’t even have to be a “class of idiots”. It would be enough if stuff didn’t just sometimes break, seemingly randomly. (It’s not quite random, obviously.)

Recent example: I had OpenSuse TW recommended because of its reliability. First tip: install codecs, which requires adding the Packman repository. Now, simply updating threw up errors several times because Packman and the other repositories are apparently not in sync, and some dependencies would break if I updated. (Waiting a few days “fixed” it, but still shouldn’t happen.)

Depending on which update method you use (Yast/Discovery/zypper/update widget) you get different error messages, most of which are not informative. This is for an established distribution known for its reliability, and this alone would keep me from ever recommending it to normal users, even moderately tech-savvy ones.

Things are getting better, but I’m still shopping around for a distro that just works. Perhaps that new Fedora version, or one of the immutable ones, now that they are getting popular.