Sooner or later we're gonna have to bypass the Great Firewall of America by VPNing into China

I'm looking at r/Conservative, Gab, and other far-right outlets to see what is happening with the incoming administration, and all I can say is what the actual fuck

We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!

I can't decide whether this is hilarious or terrifying

dihydrogen monoxide is also dangerous, we must ban it as well

Some things I would caution here for clarification:

Matrix is known to leak metadata and has weaker E2E encryption than other E2E encrypted platforms.

Signal is better than most platforms for one-on-one messaging (can also be used for larger groups but doesn't have channels) but it has shady requirements like requiring a phone number and requiring an Android or iOS device (doesn't support less corporate OSes like Linux as primary device) and the desktop application message storage not being secure (largely a desktop OS problem since their security tends to be horrible, but Signal could add more protections and doesn't), and other weird things like requiring proprietary libraries and not having fully FOSS builds and crypto stuff. It's not anonymous meaning theoretically the Signal backend could link sender IP addresses to exact recipients which is just enough data to be useful to intelligence agencies if Signal happens to be compromised (which they have received government funding in the past and suspiciously stopped updating their backend repo for like a year not too long ago). Signal is fine for the average person, but I've seen political activist groups use it and act like they're anonymous and I would be very careful in that situation. Otherwise if you know people that use Signal it's still better than most platforms, I would recommend using the Molly client which is actually FOSS and has more security features than the official Signal client.

Cwtch looks like the ~~overall best alternative~~ (edit: actually it's not on F-Droid which is weird) to Signal since it is decentralized, doesn't require a phone number, has all of the main encryption features Signal has, and has an option for running a server to reduce battery life and increase message delivery reliability. Briar is similar and works over Bluetooth and local Wi-Fi making it a decent option for protests (if you even bring a phone). SimpleX Chat looks better than Signal as well since it doesn't require a phone number. Also XMPP which is decentralized and self-hosted but it requires a server setup. I haven't really used either of these platforms though so I can't attest to whether they actually work well.

Lemmy and Mastodon are not private unless you are very careful in signing up for a public instance and not revealing your identity, assuming the instance you sign up for even allows that. However, they aren't run by corporations with shady agendas which is the most important part.

and move where? to another country electing fascists?

I'm really nervous about losing my already barely accessible healthcare since my medication is extremely expensive

TikTok is popular because it's addicting, not because it's useful, so I don't understand why anyone would use this.

Doesn't NYT cut off most of the article now? I used to just be able to disable JS but that didn't work anymore last I checked.

I'm a duck btw

Fedora is a good middle ground, it's what Asahi Linux uses as its official distro

My high school from a red state was like 99% white and also 99% conservative and had this attitude of racism is bad but also racism doesn't exist anymore then proceeds to make racist jokes and support racist politics (including students who were very academically focused), although it never evolved to anything as stupid as taking a group photo holding up a racial slur. There was a lot of stuff from there though that seemed normal at the time then after I left realized how fucked it was, and I know of other people who think the same thing.