I’m not sure if “things have gotten so bad”. The native English speakers who actually use this stuff are probably the ones who struggled with writing in school and have always been terrible at it. That’s obviously not everyone though, a lot of people are still competent enough to type their own emails.

What is a widely-known fact? From the “uH yEaH” you sound like you’re trying to argue with me but I’m not really sure what your point is. I never said piracy can’t be a service issue, what I said is that people who trot this line out literally every single time to defend their pirating should follow through when piracy becomes more convoluted and time consuming than the legal alternative. Many don’t, the line has become a convenient catch-all cop out that people hide behind so they can pretend acquiring everything for free makes them some kind of morally superior consumer activist. I wasn’t having a go at OP specifically, but the logical conclusion when you get to their point should be to give up and pay or rent through a library or something.

If I really couldn’t find something and I was really that desperate, I’d just try to buy it somewhere. Assuming it’s also difficult to buy, I’d be looking at online marketplaces and op shops. If pirates are going to keep hiding behind the “piracy is a service problem” line then at some point they do need to admit that paying for the product is actually the more sensible and straightforward option if they have reached a deadend elsewhere.

Possibly, although it hasn’t stopped people from doing it in the past.

The majority of their servers support port forwarding. “Only available on paid tiers” is a completely meaningless crticism, because a) you wouldn’t use a free VPN for torrenting unless you were an absolute moron and b) very few VPNs support torrenting in the first place because it requires so many resources. If you want a good VPN with port forwarding, you need to pay for it. Nothing about this makes Proton VPN “fishy”.

As the other person said, the owners of PIA also own several other VPNs and their history prior to this was pretty bad. One of the biggest selling points for PIA, the “no logging tested in court” claim, also occured before these new owners took over so it’s questionable whether that is as believable today. A big part of trust in privacy-related software comes from financial incentives and motivations driven by the business model, and the parent company does not have a good track record in terms of prioritising security and privacy above financial gain.

I believe Private Internet Access also offers this feature if people need a cheaper alternative, although it comes with tradeoffs regarding trust and ethics.

Yes, Proton VPN is a better option if you require that feature.

But many people don’t want to have everything completely public

This isn’t true at all. Most people do not care about privacy; those that do are an extreme minority. You (presumably) and I are part of that minority yet even we still comment here, in a public space. The issue with forums has never been about privacy because most are content with pseudonymity. It is a big mistake to think we need to cater to the extreme minority in the privacy space when tackling big issues that involve a majority who do not care.

Discord is far worse in this context, though. Much of reddit is still publicly visible and is still indexed by some search engines, even if it could be better. Discussions from years ago are still visible and provide useful information to many (this is part of the reason “search term + reddit” became such a popular query template). When communities move to Discord, many of their conversations become completely private to anyone who isn’t a member. The conversations move quickly and there is no easy way for people to reference past information. I get that people on Lemmy hate reddit and it’s popular to circlejerk about it, but forums being replaced by things like Discord and Telegram that aren’t equivalents at all has been much more damaging.

It’s actually not a very comms heavy game now. Like some players definitely enjoy their milsim call-outs and coordinating more closely with their squad, but a lot of players like myself are just totally silent. It was added to Xbox Game Pass last year, and that has introduced a ton of more casual players.

Yeah that’s fair, it’s definitely not that kind of game. A match does take quite a long time (although you are under no obligation to stay for the whole thing, again like Battlefield). Hopefully you have some free time to try it out at some point in the future, if it’s something you’re still interested in!

I’m not sure if you meant literally no free time to play video games, or just not willing to make time for a perceived steep learning curve, but if it’s the latter then maybe you could reconsider. The basics can be learnt very quickly via YouTube and it’s possible to have quite a bit of fun casually playing an hour here or there as the Rifleman class simply treating it like a milsim Battlefield without ever diving into the deeper mechanics.

It’s way less egregious than the Brave co-founder making donations in support anti-gay marriage amendments, and even that has been massively overblown (the real reasons to avoid Brave are a) Chromium, b) shady crypto stuff and c) its financial incentives as a for-profit company with investor backing to compromise on its claimed ethical principles). I’m getting so sick of these purity tests on completely irrelevant and unrelated issues standing in the way of genuine alternatives to big tech. People are so eager to let perfect be the enemy of good.

One of the more recent examples from last year was Mozilla’s announcement of PPA (Privacy-Preserving Attribution). Essentially the organisation is trying to create a new system for click-based advertising where an advertiser can be notified that you clicked on their ad, helping them and the websites which host their ads, without compromising your personal privacy. The way it has historically worked is you click on an ad and give away a ton of your personal data, or you straight up block all these ads and their trackers which makes a lot of the web unsustainable (because it is funded by advertising). Anyway, like with this latest controversy a lot of people didn’t bother to read any of Mozilla’s statements and instead based their entire opinion off clickbait headlines like ‘Firefox’s New ‘Privacy’ Feature Actually Gives Your Data to Advertisers’ which made PPA sound like a reduction of consumer privacy, which it isn’t. And again, like this current controversy, you also had a lot of privacy activists who do not live in reality claiming that anything other than a 100$ rejection of all advertising online equaled 100% complicity and that Mozilla had sold out on one of its core principles.

I find reading books quite meditative and I like the initial challenge of maintaining my concentration for the first 10 minutes or so before I can relax and sink into it a bit. I sympathise with everyone else struggling to read as much as an adult though, it was so much easier for me during childhood. Sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed about how little I read now given how advanced I was as a kid. It feels like I’ve been wasting a skill/hobby that could have provided me with a lot of happiness and growth as an adult.

It would be amazing of course, and my entire attitude towards Firefox would change overnight if we had that kind of guaranteed security. At the moment I just look at it as the best least-worst option for the short to medium term future. I recently learned about Ladybird but that is still a fair way off, so for now my priority is to continue supporting Firefox and trying to avoid a future where Google has theoretical control over everything.

You’ve just explained that to make Firefox secure you need to watch some video of someone that you hope knows what they’re talking about.

No actually, I didn’t. I suggested that anyone who is not confident/literate enough to work this out for themselves through self-research online can access extremely beginner-friendly guides on YouTube that step-by-step walk them through the setup. Everyone knows how to use YouTube, please don’t insult my intelligence by implying it’s some kind of semi-mythical resource known only to the the biggest “nerds”.

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In that case your entire argument for LibreWolf is a complete waste of time, because this theoretical user you’re referring to also wouldn’t bother to download an unknown niche privacy browser. LibreWolf is essentially just hardened Firefox for people who are too lazy to do it themselves. The crossover between completely tech illiterate but also privacy-focused is an insanely small market.