You are not making sense here. Please try to clarify your point because it seems to be disconnected from the comment you are responding to.

Micay did not step down nor is it a symbolic gesture. He removed himself, at the demand of others within the organization, from any public relations duties he once held. He is an excellent and talented engineer and an absolutely horrible representative.

He has no people skills. He does continue to contribute and guides the project privately. It should have been done long ago because I think he has done a lot of damage by overreacting and fostering a community of toxicity by being a bad example.

Since his departure it has been improving and GrapheneOS is becoming mature and a far cry from the Copperhead days.

Already some good suggestions here but adding Grist if you want more of a smart spreadsheet solution…

DNS services with blocks lists such as Pi-Hole, AdGuard, NextDNS, etc, provide a centralized config file for all devices on a network, so you only configure once, collect statistics, have built in block lists that can be easily modified and updated either automatically or manually and are fast.

Using large lists in a host file will slow local resolution. It wasn’t designed for this use case as it’s acting a flat file database with a limited amount of RAM allocated for the process and will get slower the longer the list. While this latency won’t be noticeable in the thousands of lines, once you start hitting hundreds of thousand or millions of entries it will start to crawl.

Hosts file are also unable to RegEx or Wildcard entries which means you would have to duplicated lots of variations in domains…

I mean I can also statically assign IPs to ever client and keep a spreadsheet, but why don’t I just use DHCP?

Correct me if I’m wrong but Matrix and it’s bridges are open source and the FOSS version of Beeper. Beeper just took it, closed sourced it and made it convenient for normies to use…

It doesn’t matter if you use a service or not. Someone in your family most likely has DNA on file, either through voluntary submission, like 23andme, or through law enforcement, military government interactions that require submission. Once a family member is on file, it’s easy to ID you. Many crimes have been solved this way. Point being, doesn’t even matter if you try to keep private, if a nation state or three letter agency wants you, you done. If you’re worried about some company having your data just don’t participate in any of them… pretty much all you can do currently.

Wut? Are you thinking of Americas Army?

Arma is a military simulation game made by Czech developer Bohemian Interactive…

Exactly this. All people do things that can be considered wrong. The difference between good and bad people is the good ones realize it, and change their behavior. This is what it is to be human.

Backpedaling in 3…2… oh there it is

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/vultr_content_controversy/

I’m in my forties so I was around when cell phones first became a thing and you had to T9 type your messages and was in my late twenties when smartphones became a things. The cost is the right answer. It was much cheaper in the states to txt earlier than other places. So the US stuck with SMS longer as that’s what people were used to and it eventually became free while in other parts of the world it did not but data and WiFi became more affordable, so people jumped to IM.

This is location specific. In the mainstream US FB use is down among youth and because of that it is has gone down among older adults. FB marketplace is still pretty popular and so is Instagram. So even in the US Meta is doing okay.

Internationally, specifically Latin America, Europe and SE Asia, Facebook, WhatsApp, Marketplace are effectively the most popular way to communicate on anything.

WhatsApp is basically the phone, Marketplace is in some places the only way to find real estate and just about anything else. And Facebook is used by every business.

Meta internationally is raking in Ad money in the billions and billions. People have been convinced that their privacy is worth less than the convenience and utility. Because for them there is no better alternative. In addition in some of these cultures the idea of privacy is a foreign concept.

There is also Komga , Librum and Stump.

This article covers the solution https://access.redhat.com/solutions/7044059

I bought both his books back in December. They are really cool and one of the most intuitive ways to learn about logic gates. If you decide to pick one up he is back ordered so expect to wait a little bit. Dude is doing the whole thing himself out of his house…

You seem to be seeking some kind of AI proxy, I think you’re trying to anonymize your prompts. VPNs and Wikipedia are not ideal examples of this. But I will try to answer the intent of your question.

All AI as a service provider will log your queries. The only way to sort of anonymize would be to use someone else’s key/credentials. But that would just push off the logging to someone else. It’s like sharing out your Netflix password…

The only truly anonymous way is to run your own, by self hosting an open LLM, which is doable, yet much more complicated, and would not be as good as the current big company services.

Not a whole lot can be done with a first and last name and a phone number. If someone is motivated they don’t need any of this to do harm.

As an example at my job people know my first and last name and I give it to people voluntarily without knowing anything about the other person. While I don’t give out my personal phone number, I know lots of people that do. Sometimes on their business card or even email.

You may be over thinking this and just use it as a lesson to be a bit more guarded and aware of social pressure in the future.

When Siege came out in 2015 I was obsessed and have played it for well over a thousand hours.

It has progressively became more and more diluted and I haven’t played in a few years.

What do they say about trying to squeeze blood from a turnip?

Yes, Kagi has a bunch of “Lenses” not just for Lemmy & Kbin but for all kinds of sources.

As of right now I’m not sure how you could SEO boost Lemmy. The federation makes it seem like a single post exists on many different sites.

With nearly a thousand Lemmy instances it’s as though someone cross posted to hundreds of websites which there would be no way to prioritize with the way current mainstream search engines work.

They just need to program a method for indexing Lemmy, and the rest of the ActivityPub compatible services, as a single entity. I am sure they will catch up eventually.

I assume you’re phrasing this as a question to challenge what I said regarding main stream search engines.

It is possible to get a random hit on Lemmy, as instances are crawled like any other webpage. Just like you might get a Mastadon hit every once in a while. However they will not rank very high and almost always be buried a few pages in, while a Reddit post will rank much higher for the same search.

It’s the natured of how federation works and search engines don’t account for it. You can increase your chances by including a specific instance name or the word Lemmy.

Kagi is a search engine that has built in Lemmy/Kbin search.

If you’re talking about mainstream search engines then no, they haven’t started supporting Fediverse content yet.