Full stack developer and privacy advocate. I like to keep the mentality, if you can program one language well, then you can program in any language!
YouTube has been cracking down on alternative frontends.
Vanilla Invidious currently doesn’t work well,
so most hosters paused and/or gave up.
Fijxu runs a fork of Invidious,
with their own modifications implemented to circumvent the blocks,
here’s the source code if you’re interested:
https://git.nadeko.net/Fijxu/invidious
I’ve got big respect for Fijxu,
he’s been doing a very good job of keeping Invidious alive + fighting against the YouTube crackdown lately, basically all on his own.
If you can please consider:
All the above can help Fijxu,
since currently he’s mostly fighting a big tech giant all on his own.
I believe Briar currently is one of the best options out there, together with SimpleX.
However I lack usage experience with both.
Since no one I know makes use of them…
It was already hard enough to convince only a handful of my friends to start using Session and Matrix/Element (which are not the best options anymore), but I’m kinda doubtful about my success rate of making them switch once again…
My success with convincing people to use Telegram has been better though, since that’s the most commonly known, but nearly no one wants to install an app they never heard off before, just to chat with only me :P
Also “convincing people” lately goes smth like this for me:
*Don’t Use Session,
if your threat profile includes government’s spending ±100k to crack your encryption, since their encryption is not the best out there.
Which they likely won’t for an average privacy conscious user, but they might for high ranking criminals.
It was a good read though,
I won’t invite new people to Session due to it.
But the title is a little click-baity,
“Session’s encryption is not the best”,
would be a more honest title.
Regarding AI, I filled it in as following:
SearXNG: https://github.com/searxng/searxng
It enhances and respects privacy,
is open source and self hostable,
and queries multiple configurable search engines (google, bing, brave, duckduckgo, …)
You can find a list of public hosted instances here:
https://searx.space/
However I prefer to slap an instance randomizer on top, so each of my queries goes through another public SearXNG instance, for more privacy, and mostly, to bypass rate-limiting after frequent queries.
For this I use:
Imagine living in China,
where the government is able to request data of each company in their country.
Imagine that China would setup an AI/LLM,
to feed all private chat data into it,
and automatically flagging opposition of the government regime.
Imagine a white van appearing in front of your house and disappearing into a concentration camp because you got flagged after expressing your opposition to the government to your mate in a private chat.
All collected data can be abused like that,
or by other means (E.g. a country at war gets hacked, which could lead to leaking critical private information on political/defensive decisions).
To me the question is not if data collected on you will be abused, but rather when will it be abused?
Just having it stored somewhere imposes risks.
Hope these will help with opting out for data collection / informing yourself about it:
RedLib, the continuation of LibReddit,
still works:
https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
I use it in combination with this GreaseMonkey script,
to redirect me to a random RedLib instance:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469587-reddit-to-libreddit-redirect
Due to instances often going down and/or stop working.
If you’re talking about a wallet,
what’s wrong with Monerujo?
https://www.monerujo.app/
Been using it for a while, open source,
scanned for trackers, contains none.
You do need to add their own repo to F-Droid to download it from there though:
https://f-droid.monerujo.io/fdroid/repo?fingerprint=a82c68e14af0aa6a2ec20e6b272eff25e5a038f3f65884316e0f5e0d91e7b713