Reddit taught me to never trust a silicon valley, centralized, proprietary service on the internet with my data and/or content
Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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Chat rooms
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[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Well you shouldn't trust a public, decentralized, open source personally hosted service either.
I don't really know who's hosting the Lemmy or other fediverse services I use and what access they have to the data that we post on there.
Basically, you shouldn't trust any online service with your data and your posts.
I went the other route. I am very noisy online. I post and comment all over the place but I treat all of that as what it is, content I have given away freely and publicly. Now, when I need to do something privately, you are going to need serious mojo to be able to dig it out. Plus, who would assume that I do certain things privately when almost everything I do is out in the open.
SELECT 'ipaddress', 'username' FROM tables
WHERE (username.normalize() == "jomiran"
OR post.links CONTAIN "jomiran")
FILTER content IN _blacklist_keywords;
Or some such. Data is easy to mine if you have a target. It's finding unknown targets that is hard.
whoa there pardner
People who write "funny" error messages should be tied to a tree and have old circut boards thrown at their feet
everything about that error page is Toxic AF
Started? Been having that issue for months now. It only works on VPN if you're logged on.
Certain VPN servers can go through it they haven't implemented a block for it yet. AirVPN launched some new servers that worked for a bit, but Reddit blocked them a few weeks later.
They started also blocking OLD.reddit.com this week. I made a comment a couple months ago alluding to old.reddit.com still working even though they were blocking tor and known VPNs on www.reddit.com. I'm sure about 10,000 other people figured it out at the same time as me, since it was such a simple bypass, and I'm surprised it took this long to fix.
There are still at least 2 other unpatched ways.
old.reddit.com is the only Reddit website I use. I have every reddit link automatically redirect to that website as well. I haven't been able to access old.reddit.com for months on most servers of 3 different VPNs I've used.
These assholes forget that people need to use VPNs in many situations. All the bitch ass corporate folks that never have to use their computers in a coffee shop, etc. Fuck spez.
It goes much deeper than just coffee shops and other public wifi. There are people in oppressive countries that have to use VPNs to get around their country-wide bans of certain sites, such as anything that provides access to information. Reddit used to be a sanction for tons of information sharing. But now, with Reddit going public, they have to appeal to their shareholders, who probably have business or other deals in those oppressive countries. So, even if Reddit is simply trying to force users to be trackable, it still behooves the shareholders to make information and knowledge more difficult to access to certain people.
You can still use the site via VPN if you’re logged in. Which is really the entire point. They don’t actually care if you’re using a VPN; It’s just another method to force people to make an account, so the “active accounts” number looks good to shareholders.
And I just discovered this some weeks ago. The "woah there, pardner!" is so cringeworthy.
The whole website is cringe. It has some of the best little communities are on there, but they are the exceptions. Most of it is power-tripping mods and disingenuous arguments from far-right lunatics on a foundation of "narwhal bacon lol."
what an absolute garbage site it has turned into
Evil bastards will continue to wring every bit of tracked engagement they can, now that they're publicly traded. It's the only way to satisfy capitalist markets. Woooooo!
I'm glad I'm over here now.
Workaround if you are using uBlock Origin:
reddit.com##+js(set-cookie-reload, reddit_session, 0)
old.reddit.com##+js(set-cookie-reload, reddit_session, 0)
Add this to your filters.
Gasp
Tempting but the block page is helping remind me to stay mad at Reddit
They really want to track you
VPNs don't prevent tracking, especially when you're logging into services.
They can help obfuscate your identity to varying degrees, but honestly this is a pretty odd decision. I'm guessing it has more to do with malicious activity, or some other type of activities that Reddit is trying to curtail, and they feel blocking VPN IP ranges will help them.
Jokes on them I block them on the DNS level.
I'm making a list, and I'll be checking it thrice lol.
Gonna ban all major sites and IPs. The Internet used to be about the small guy not the downtown.
To clarify, you can still use old reddit logged in with a VPN, but they no longer allow you to browse logged out with a VPN. Still bad of course. But if you're willing to log in you don't have to turn off your VPN. You can sign up with a throwaway/obfuscated email if needs be
I just, don't visit reddit anymore.
Problem solved...
Sadly, when researching problems or interests, often Redditposts have useful info.
PSA: you still don't need an email to register. Simply register via old.reddit.
Not necessarily.
My primary account was banned from Reddit. (I suggested arson as a way of solving the early stages of a Nazi infestation in a neighborhood, and Reddit claimed this was "instigating violence", as though Nazis were humans.) They also banned all of my alternate accounts. Any account that i tried to open--regardless of which computer I used, browser, VPN, e-mail address, etc.--also ended up getting banned. I think that they must have been doing some kind of hardware fingerprinting that I wasn't able to get around, even with canvas blocker etc., and any computer that I'd used to log into Reddit on my primary account was linked to that account, and hence banned from creating an account.
It took a while, but I did manage to overwrite every single post and comment I'd made in the last 10+ years for that account.
Ok, you do that, but people who don't want to get cut off from 400 million people, how do we fuck up and breakthrough reddit's anti anonimity defenses ?
Killing reddit is on the table, but is there a more practical approach ?
i dont have an account anymore but for anytime i need to view a reddit post i use RedReader. its an open-source thirdparty app thats still allowed to use reddits API for accesibility reasons.
The Redlib frontend still works. In my opinion it also provides a much nicer UI than the official Reddit website or even old.reddit.com. This is the list of public instances: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/instances.md
That's bad, Reddit is blocked in my country. VPN is my key to the open world
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.
there is libreddit with multiple public instances, for example https://libreddit.lunar.icu
No clue how long it will take until they block that as well, but for now it works with VPN.
You can use a browser plugin for automatically redirecting.
I looked up to see is my VPN is connected. It is. Good. Moving right along.
Buying puts first thing on Monday, killing old.reddit is the nail in the coffin for many
So I can NOT access old.reddit anymore on any of my linux machines with firefox and nordvpn extension, but I can access both old and new on windows with firefox and extension, and old on android with FF mobile and nordvpn app. Haven't tried new on android for obvious reasons.
Oh, they did this with my actual ip lol don't know what I did
Good. The more they abuse their user base the more people will look for alternatives. Hello Lemmy! :)
Confirmed by me
It is likely someone using the same VPN service using the same server or server on the same subnet was scraping data or similar and got blocked. Therefore you are too.
Same issue. I guess I'm never going back there. I've already stopped doing it, but from time to time a question I was researching let me to Reddit.
What's the best tool to delete your account, while also overriding all of your posts and comments?
That's what i experienced today with tor, it didn't even surprise me
How can they distinguish VPN users? I'm guessing it's a IP blocklist.