I’d say there’s an optimum number of people, you’re less likely to have meaningful interactions with a very high number of people. Mastodon is a lot closer to that optimum.

For me Mastodon is better than Twitter ever was, you can have real social interactions there, Twitter had too many people shouting for attention. I believe more by the day that smaller social media is better.

Most (though not all) in the UK since at least the 90s are plastic except for the heating element and electronics, microplastic concerns aside they’re considered more efficient since it’s a better insulator. Regardless of material every home has one I can tell you that.

I know it’s an annoying cliche answer at this point but I really do love my air fryer, it got me out of a cooking rut and made me more creative. I’ve had it for a year and a half an use it 3-4 times a week.

blocked

I haven’t blocked anyone yet, not really a believer in it unless they’re personally targeting me. For me it feels like plastering over cracks, I’d rather just leave if there were too many toxic people around.

They’re a political group by definition, even if you don’t believe the rationale it’s their prerogative, if they left former Twitter purely because it didn’t align with their values that wouldn’t be a contradiction in and of itself because their whole reason for existing is taking a political stand.

They don’t have their own instance as far as I know but they’re very active on mastodon.social

People who use marijuana are like your stereotypical vegans or Arch uses. Never pass on the opportunity to tell you.

A sign saying Labrador to me is less proof to me than a body of pictures documenting the culture; and I don’t necessarily mean artistic or traditional culture, it could be streets, houses, road-signs, shops, infrastructure, etc. that have features that rule out it being anywhere else, that’s what’s lacking. If Tristan da Chunha is a bad example, you could try Greenland (only double the population of Labrador but sparser), which is even colder.

I have that one too…

That’s pretty typical of the pictures I can find; nothing that shows any culture or lifestyle that couldn’t be mocked up in a moment.

Compare, for example, an image search for Tristan da Cunha (a far more remote, less populated, and less visitable place than Labrador) with one for Labrador, Canada. Most of the images you get back from the Labrador search featuring buildings will actually be of Newfoundland because of search engine algorithms these days so discard those. The Tristan da Cunha pictures show people and life, even if they’re mainly of tourists, but the Labrador pictures are all like that one at best.

I’m not crazy and I’ve never heard of it as a conspiracy theory but personally I’m not 100% convinced about Labrador, Canada. The only pictures I can find of the place are either pictures of scenery that could be anywhere, extremely generic, or low-resolution aerial shots of settlements, nothing that concretely convinces me it exists. I know it’s remote and sparsely populated, but there are more remote, less populated places that I can get normal pictures showing daily life a lot more easily.

I expect this will be a controversial take but hear me out. I think it’s futile, to an extent, to fight against so-called echo chambers since it’s so ingrained in human tribal nature that the alternative ends up being worse for us. Having some key points of consensus is not necessarily all bad, it mirrors how socialising works in the real world, where people tend to connect with like-minded people, groups of people may not agree on everything but usually have some core values in common that tie them together (note, I still think that Lemmy has less of these types of values in common than most real world friendship groups, but it’s closer to it).

On the other hand, throwing everyone together on the same corporate social media platform is something recent and unnatural. People don’t have respectful debates and listen to each other there, they argue, get angry, and dig deeper into their beliefs. For example I would never have made a comment on Reddit, like this one, that I think might be slightly against the grain of the thread since you just get shouted down by defensive people who have already made up their minds. Here on Lemmy I don’t expect everyone to agree with me all the time but I believe they might at least listen, so I feel freer to express myself, then again I do have some core values in common with most people here which is what enables that.

You could use something like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed where all software is updated on a rolling basis whenever updates are tested and ready. That might be for you but the downside is that big updates to software come “randomly” and could break your workflow. The point of version releases is usually to save the big feature-changing updates so they all come at a predictable point in time, and there’s usually a window to upgrade in so you can do it when most convenient. For Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. this happens every six months, so the difference between one version to the next isn’t likely to be huge, but many people prefer the predictability of an update cycle. You could also look at LTS distros which are supported for longer, but you have to wait longer for features.

I get a lot of value from YouTube that I would happily pay for, and I already pay for online services that respect me but I wouldn’t pay a company that treats users like they do. It’s not the ads I have a problem with, it’s the tracking of users. They could have ads on their website that don’t track users. You can subscribe to premium and presumably they don’t show you ads, but they still track you. If they didn’t do that I would happily pay them.

YouTube has ads?

Oh fair enough, I’ll re-examine some of that information. I don’t think I’m completely wrong. Advice on not installing extensions to avoid adding to the fingerprint comes from the official Mullvad FAQ. The philosophy of making all users look the same to blend in is something inherited from Tor Browser.

Mullvad also uses resist fingerprinting, yes canvas is unique every attempt. The EFF cover your tracks test doesn’t penalise you for it, if you’re coming up as unique there it’s not because of that (some tests out there do though and Mullvad fails them). Having a randomised canvas itself may count as one data point I guess.

Mullvad Browser:

Your browser has a non-unique fingerprint

Within our dataset of several hundred thousand visitors tested in the past 45 days, only one in 1041.72 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.

For comparison if I test in Firefox (configured as I was previously using) I get:

Your browser has a unique fingerprint

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 304,204 tested in the past 45 days.

“Strong” protection means that your browser is configured to protect against tracking, both come back as strong here, but as far as I can tell that doesn’t take into account tracking through fingerprinting. You’re right, you don’t want a unique fingerprint.

When you customise and add extensions to your browser, you add to its fingerprint so even privacy extensions can be counterproductive. The way Mullvad Browser works is that because it comes ready configured for privacy with various privacy extensions (including UBo) installed by default you don’t have to make changes. While this doesn’t give you a “common” fingerprint exactly (hence “only one in 1041.72 browsers”), it makes you look like all the other Mullvad Browsers so there’s safety in numbers. There are a few more nuances to it than that but that’s basically the idea, and it’s a balancing act, you could be less unique than that but you would need to make other compromises.

The catch is that you shouldn’t try to configure Mullvad Browser yourself since that negates the benefit; you have to be able to live with the browser as it is out of the box which may mean sacrificing some of your favourite extensions.

I would say don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, if you have a problem with Mozilla as an organisation it doesn’t negate the valid concerns about the monopoly, it would effectively hand control of web standards over to Google defeating the entire ethos of the open web. The Firefox browser engine is independent even if you don’t believe the organisation behind it is, that can be verified because of open source, there’s no need to be defeatist yet.