Yes, but at least here I can choose an instance in a privacy friendly jurisdiction or one that is small enough, including a self-hosted one. It’s not a perfect shield, but federation helps a lot with digital independence (which is why it’s prominent in pre-internet theories of how to make anarchy work without collapsing into warlordism).

Spoiler alert, both British officials and EU officials are openly considering to slap an age restriction on VPN software, too. Would turn into a weird Catch-22, where you need a non-restricted VPN to download a non-restricted VPN, like in China right now.

Oh, I absolutely am blaming the politicians behind this (and the lobby groups behind them). The only strictly wrong thing Reddit does is how it implements that law, i.e., using third-party age verification that happens to also use your data to profile you and that has been shown to be insecure (Further Reading links in my post).

Agreed. Lemmy, while being very new, mimics features of ye olden times. Newsgroup era and all… But Reddit kinda started that way and then, as all good things, slowly enshittified. It seemed to resist enshittification longer than most sites. At least that was my impression. But good things can’t last. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, after all, I guess.

Here I am, not enough hands for all the cookies and kitties. Haven’t used Reddit in months and perfectly happy without it. Still sharing my sadness about seeing “the old internet” slip further and further down that slope.

There is LibreLynx Lite on F-Droid, but it is very bare bones. Do not recommend, especially while IronFox exists.

Rarely. I would say that about 19/20 pages work as expected. I do keep a manually hardened Firefox install on my device for the rare site that I do want to visit but that doesn’t load in IronFox for some reason. In my experience, VPN breaks the internet more than IronFox does. And I still want to use VPN.

Can you explain in a little more detail how enforcing online ID prevents WW3? Genuinely curious. The only thing I think of that national online ID might help with is counter intelligence, especially in defense against psyops. However, in the few cases that we do know about psyops toppling elections, e.g., Brexit, these were performed on behalf of or with the aid of party and government officials in the affected countries. If any, this would become easier, because widespread online ID silents dissenting voices, while well-financed entities can navigate and / or circumvent such regulation (also see, for example, the effect of GDPR on the market structure of attention merchants in Europe).

If Chromium becomes incompatible with privacy, the only real and broadly accepted alternative is FireFox. Which implementation, and as always in these kinds of discussions, that depends on your threat model: On desktop, I am very happy with LibreWolf. Mullvad Browser is also great, especially with Mullvad VPN, though it breaks pages a little more often than LibreWolf. On Android, I am quite happy with IronFox.

I’m not ideologically opposed to people earning money with their unique ideas and artistic execution. Creative work is work is work. But I don’t think that IP should be the gift that keeps on giving three generations after an authors death. IMHO, the public has a reasonable interest in works remaining available, that’s why the “maintenance / out of print” clause. Writing good code is authorship. It’s only natural the same rules apply, though I wouldn’t be principally opposed to applying different time lines, e.g., 5 years for unmaintained proprietary code vs 20 years for books, to reflect the uniquely fast pace of software development vs the more long-lasting beauty of traditional art and literature. Of course there would need to be some very careful wording to define maintenance (e.g., in respect to which platform? What about versions of the same software) and to prevent on-paper continued availability of books at an inappropriately increased price. However, I believe the law makers and the courts could handle this medium diff if there was political will.

Yeah, how about we shorten that to a cumulative 10 years out of support / maintenance / print or after the death of the author / artist, whatever earlier. For software, a five years out of support threshold would honestly be preferable but I’ll be generous.

Software that is not actively maintained for a certain time should become public property. The same goes for books or music that go out of print for so long. “you want to sell me your original product? That’s cool. You don’t wanna do that anymore? Alright, but no need to bury it in obscurity.”

Appreciate the recommendations. I will give IronFox a try.

I often feel a little ‘legislative paralysis’. On the one hand, I want as little government interference in the free web as possible. On the other hand we can see first hand that web anarchy collapses into web oligarchy. I guess the EU is demonstrating that targeted legislation, like one click unsubscribe or one click cookie denial, can improve the web experience and privacy even beyond their borders. Baby steps… When do we get one click delete all my data? And when does a single page start caring whether my browser sends a Do not track request or not? Until then, it’s back to private privacy measures… Even if that’s an uphill battle.