I’ll add that there is also controversy surrounding the game due to the goblins allegedly mirroring a lot of antisemitic stereotypes

https://www.jta.org/2023/02/10/culture/are-the-goblins-in-the-new-harry-potter-video-game-really-antisemitic

Admin of the instance posted that they wouldn’t ban anyone for playing the new HP game and in addition would not allow spoiler posts from said game. Admin got a lot of grief for this and announced the server shutdown in response. He then preceded to tell a few different people who critiqued him to “kill themselves”.

I think YouTube Vanced is no longer supported by the devs and it was never a privacy-focused project anyway. There are plenty of FOSS Android apps that can stream YouTube more privately though. NewPipe is probably the most popular.

Switching browsers is probably the easiest with the biggest impact, but you’ve already done that. Switching your search engine to a privacy-friendly one is also a good step.

For now the community has just a little over ten subscribers and very few posts (besides my own) so I’m content to leave it up to users’ judgements. If it gets more popular that may change.

That’s a decision that would either have to be made by the instance admins or the moderators of the current general meme communities. Absent that, I think a dedicated non-political meme community is a good solution.

Perhaps, but that is the decision of the moderators of those meme communities. Starting a new meme community is free.

As usual, Rob has a mix of good and misleading advice, sprinkled with pushing his own products. Let’s not be naïve and think that using a separate browser exclusively for you Google account will stop Google from correlating browser fingerprints. And while he gives a nod to this being a “moderate” approach, simply protecting your online political activity from Google (assuming his approach even does that) is really doing fairly little to stop Google’s profiling of you. Google’s main goal in collecting data about its users is targeted advertisement, not political persecution.

VPNs have a solid use case, though of course cannot provide the anonymity of the Tor Browser. The article actually does a pretty good job of laying out the pros and cons of each, so it’s a little disappointing that the title is so click-baity and oversimplifying.

It’s cool that they have that info (hadn’t noticed it before), though it only looks at the front end code, there is no way to check for any malicious code on the back end. At the very least, logging the IP addresses that use the search engine is trivial without any changes to the front end. Actually correlating search queries to IPs would probably be harder since the query isn’t in the URLs, but maybe not that much harder, I’m not sure.

There’s no such thing as “couldn’t log” when you’re talking about an open source project. The source code can always be modified. Even if something is open-source, you’re always trusting the one hosting it with your data.

As you’ve said, the major issue with SearX and other open source and self-hostable options is that they don’t have their own crawlers and self-hosting means giving your IP to the big tech search engines you’re pulling results from. Tor or other proxies are always an option to prevent this but they make it more likely that your search requests from Google, etc. will be blocked. For centralized search engines with better-than-average privacy policies and their own crawlers, Brave Search probably is the best option at the moment in terms of returning relevant results.

That said, I’m eagerly awaiting for an open-source, self-hostable search engine with its own crawler. We shouldn’t be satisfied with the current lackluster options.

DDG censors things based on politics because Bing (where it gets its search results) does. And Google also censors results based on politics so I’m not sure how SP is a step up in that department. That being said, Google’s results tend to be more relevant to the search query than Bing’s, which is why SP’s results are often more relevant than DDG’s.

I would disagree. I understand the issues people have with Cloudflare and how their man-in-the-middle as a service business model compromises privacy and internet decentralization in general, but there’s just no comparison to Google, whose business model is to build personalized advertising profiles for all of their users.

Really? I can. I’m trying to move away from Gmail, but in the meantime, K9 can connect to it with an app-specific password.

I agree that pointing out the problem is far easier than finding a good solution. I don’t think activity-based sorting is much better since, as you said, that just tends to promote the most outrageous content. Facebook and Twitter-like platforms suffer from that issue more than Reddit-like platforms do. In short, I don’t have a good solution and I acknowledge the benefits of the upvote/downvote system (such as outrageous and irrelevant content being filtered out by the community without the need for as much active moderation), but it is a poor tool for fostering civil, ideologically diverse communities.

Agreed. My phone is about to stop getting security updates and now I have to decide whether or not I should buy a new model even though my current phone works just fine.

Ultimately, Lemmy is a Reddit clone and one problem with Reddit-like platforms is the upvote/downvote system heavily promotes groupthink since dissenting opinions are downvoted into oblivion while consensus opinions are promoted. Lemmy attempts to solve this problem by being open source, self-hostable, and federated (which are all great things), but these aspects alone can’t totally solve the inherent groupthink problem, it just makes it easier for those with differing views to spin off and start their own instances, which will likely have their own groupthink.

As politically centrist myself, I’ve basically just unsubscribed from the political communities and focus on the more tech-related ones. If an apolitical or more centrist political Lemmy instance which federated with lemmy.ml was started there’s a good chance I’d join.

The CDC has this infographic (https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/pdfs/UnderstandDifferenceInfographic-508.pdf) comparing surgical masks and N95 masks.

However, since it sounds like you’re looking for a peer-reviewed article, I did some digging and found this review article (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/rmv.2336) from the Reviews in Medical Virology journal. It’s recently published and though I didn’t read the whole article, I’ll include the summary paragraph here.

“Only wearing N95 or equivalent masks (OR, 0.30; 95% CI, 0.20–0.44; GRADE, low) was associated with a decreased risk infection from all coronaviruses (SARS‐CoV, MERS‐CoV and SARS‐CoV‐2). The results were similar for assessment of the comparative effectiveness of masks against SARS and MERS (Figure 5b) and COVID‐19 (Figure 5c).”

Although the authors do clarify, “This study does not claim the ineffectiveness of surgical or medical masks nor does it oppose their use.”

It’s better for privacy but has other trade-offs. It’s slower than most VPNs and often blocked by hosts. I have nothing against Tor, but each have their own use cases.