Can you imagine explaining to someone in 1999 that a significant amount of politics in 2025 would surround what websites we decide to spend 12 hours a day on

Fingerprinting unfortunately uses more than useragent strings. It takes hashes of data in your browser from a javascript context that is not easily masked or removed. For example, it might render a gradient of colors projected onto a curved 3d plane. The specific result of this will create a unique hash for your GPU. They can also approximate your geolocation by abusing the time-to-live information within a TCP packet, which is something you can’t control on the clientside at all. If you TRULY want to avoid tracking by google, you need to block google domains in your hosts file and maybe consider disabling javascript on all sites by default until you trust them. Also don’t use google.

The internet feels post-apocalyptic now. I no longer have any social media accounts (does lemmy count?) . Places that I spent over a decade on now feel so hostile and foreign. I joined reddit as a teenager wanting to read f7u12 comics, and now reddit feels like a total outrage machine. I mean the ads are crap but the algorithm doesn’t show me content I WANT to see anymore. It just shows me videos of car accidents and street fights and other things that get my cortisol levels up. Blocking subreddits straight up doesnt work. I like that on lemmy I can just filter only by the communities I subscribe to

That’s fine. A more fragmented internet is better for the world

Digg: “join us reddit…”

To be fair, the web has become flooded with AI slop. Search engines have never been more useless. I’ve started using kagi and I’m trying to be more intentional about it but after a bit of searching it’s often easier to just ask claude

Yes

There are also some fascist states that have endured quite long like […] United States

Lmao, let me know how freshman year poli sci turns out for you

Italy, Germany, Chile

Except the 99% of times it hasnt

In principle: no. But Americans no longer have any principles (or never did in the first place)

eh the design is very flat

I’ve been working on writing my own forum in C# lately. Meant to look like some places I went on back in 2009-ish

Communism is the original bootlicking

How’s that boot taste

Yeah just had to genocide a few million Ukrainians to get there!

Yeah that’s why the Soviet union outcompeted capitalism in the 1980s lmao

Can’t imagine wanting to work for big tech these days lol. These companies had insane reputation in the 2010s. People thought working for Google was like working in willy wonka’s chocolate factory. They really squandered their brand.

I had a bitwarden premium family plan

I recently moved my digital life away from google and microsoft. I previously had the following subscriptions:

• ExpressVPN
• Onedrive
• Bitwarden
• Office 365

And I had a gmail account, which I often used for SSO. I realized that, the total monthly cost of these subscriptions together was more expensive than a single Protonmail *family * subscription, so I cancelled them all, got the family subscription, and now my wife and her sister all have protonmail accounts as well as storage, a password manager, and VPN access. In the process of moving my logins to my protonmail account, so that I don’t have to keep my ancient Facebook account around for signing into things like spotify anymore. Coupled this with moving to the federated internet from reddit and instagram

I also dropped office for libreoffice. MS Office provides dubious value over the free competition, especially with a SAAS model.