Cross-posted to !bestoflemmy@lemmy.world, which is probably the closest active community we’ve got
It is decentralized. None of the issues you bring up are proof of centralization. If you get banned from one instance or don’t like email verification or whatever your beef is, find an instance with whatever policies you like. If you can’t find such an instance, start your own.
If nobody federates with you because your instance is full of people that got banned from everywhere else, that’s decentralization in action and maybe you should stop to consider if there’s a reason nobody wants to interact with you?
Within our dataset of several hundred thousand visitors tested in the past 45 days, only one in 4244.39 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.
Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys 12.05 bits of identifying information.
Firefox mobile with various addons, most important of which is probably NoScript
It’s possible and I’ve done it, but you have to manually bridge each room, and keep the bridges in sync if you ever add/remove channels. There’s a github issue for bridging a discord server as a space in matrix that would do that automatically, but there hasn’t really been any activity on it:
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord/issues/738
F-droid is good like the other comment suggested. Aurora store is good for anything not available on F-droid.
One thing you can do is track what network connections apps are making with something like https://f-droid.org/packages/com.emanuelef.remote_capture/. It won’t help if the OS really wants to do malicious things, but you can monitor your apps at least
If you’re not using a custom ROM, you’re leaking info like a sieve to OnePlus. I moved to LineageOS because the default OS was sending every app you opened and when to the mothership. Even if they’ve stopped that, they’ve got every incentive to suck you dry, and you’ll spend much more time fighting your OS than if you just switch to a different one.
And if you don’t have a VPN set up, use Tor on your phone:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.torproject.torbrowser
The analogy would be that I get a robot to identify the ads in the magazine and cut them out before I have to see them. That’s what ad blockers do, but on a computer instead of IRL.
I don’t know why I’d flip out when encountering a paywall or login. It works out great, and as a society we don’t have to end up with ads enshittifying everything they touch.
You’re missing the point, but your example is perfect. If I have a magazine or newspaper, I’ll cut the advertisements out of them if I damn well please, and they can’t stop me. Sure, I’m not entitled to their hosting or their content, but that’s what paywalls or logins are for. When you hand off a document to someone, expect that they’ll do what they want with it, because that’s the way the world works, and also the way it should work.
Also, fuck billboards. They should be banned, like several states already do.
If you’re talking to the public, nothing you say is private. That includes federated systems like Mastodon and Lemmy. If you want privacy and federation, using an encrypted Matrix chat. There’s still of course the caveat that the people you’re talking with can leak your chats, since they have a copy of them, so don’t talk to glowies.
Not sure if this is what you’re referencing, but there’s a famous quantum computer researcher named Scott Aaronson who has this at the top of his blog:
His blog is good, talks about a lot of quantum computing stuff at an accessible level