VPNs hide your IP from your ISP and anyone they share that information with. Here in the UK ISPs keep a record of every internet connection you make and pass it on to the government and perhaps others. Using a VPN here means that instead of them knowing every single website you visit they just know you are using a VPN (or Tor, or a proxy etc if that’s what you’re using). All they can tell from that data is what time you’re active online and how much data you upload/download, not which websites you’re visiting.

The websites that you connect to at the other end can still determine who you are by means other than your IP address, like information that your machine presents to them which is unique. VPNs don’t protect against this.

A VPN is like a private courier. What the recipient does with the delivered message (and what you’ve put in it) is out of the courier’s hands.

Just the fact that NordVPN claims to protect your privacy means that the average person hears about privacy a lot

The FSF is rad

To !dadjokes@lemmy.world with you!

Why couldn’t that bird get a sleeping bag like the hamster did? Seems a bit drastic taping it down by the neck

You would need a massive pocket

Not sure whether it helps but after the last major update on YUNOhost it notified me of a few extra DNS entries I had to make. If I remember correctly it was under Domains, rather than Diagnosis.

WKD Blue

Where the hell is the left right now?

How?

I’m glad Bandcamp Friday is still happening

I sometimes wonder if NordVPN has done more for the privacy cause than anything else, purely for the sheer amount of advertising.

I am gonna have so many tabs open now.

Remember that you can always have current versions of programs by using flatpak and appimage on Debian.

I’m currently on Fedora because my hardware was not supported yet by Debian when I got it. I’ve had a lot more problems with Fedora than Debian though and intend to go back to Debian when 13 comes out and use flatpak for the applications that I really want to be at their current version.

I have similar values to yours re community and privacy.

Whose English? Not everyone can speak it fluently but I think that anyone who tries deserves at least some respect.

Agreed

I guess we disagree a bit then. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not condemning Lemmy. I think it’s extremely valuable in democratising social media. And it functions brilliantly for communication and sharing knowledge. I’m just saying that a side-effect of its functionality is that it’s also addictive. For example I believe that there users who log in, help each other troubleshoot problems growing their tomatoes and then log out, but at the same time there are users who are passively consuming content from the feed way past their bedtime. There are even memes here about it.

I mean that although it doesn’t include the most egregious functions of corporate social media platforms it is still built around features like upvoting/liking, and infinite scroll, which were originally designed to ‘gamify’ social media in order to make it more addictive.

People blame algorithms a lot but I think even the core design means that social media is too addictive. Lemmy is addictive even with no algorithm or dodgy corporate ethics for example.

There’s been a lot of turd-polishing and pleasejustalittlebitbroism when it comes to social media in my opinion.

If you are on a strictly FOSS Linux distro you may need to install video codecs or install librewolf as a flatpak or appimage.