Nope, pretty normal. You’ll find that you’ll need frontends and proxies for tons of things. For example Instagram hasn’t ever worked for me with a VPN. I no longer have an account anyway, but for the times someone sends me a link I’ve had to find sites that let you view the content without actually visiting Instagram. Same with reddit, reddit frontends are very good these days (I’d recommend any Redlib instance). Also, sometimes a specific VPN server is IP blocked and you can just connect to a different server to view a web site that blocked you initially. It is a fair amount of work, but honestly its helped me slow down my consumption of random bullshit anyway haha. I use ProtonVPN and pay for premium.

You are getting replies because you are posting opinions that don’t hold up in the real world. As a former Catholic I know from first hand experience the crisis of identity that occurs when your personally held beliefs start to clash with your local culture and the doctrine of the religion you gew up with. It is not surprising (hence the effectiveness of this con) for someone to still identify as a member of a religion that explicitly rejects their belief system.

I grew up thinking that the LGBTQ community were lost souls who faced damnation if they did not remain chaste (official doctrine), which of course led to deep prejudices resulting from this “othering” of queer people (Catholic community culture). For years after I began to disagree with the official doctrine and recognize my prejudices, I still identified myself as Catholic. For those who grow up in religious environments the religion becomes an integral part of your identity growing up, and it is not easy to let that go.

My personal experience is that I still felt hope that the Catholic Church’s doctrine could be changed, and that my participation in the community could help bring that about. It took a long time to realize this was a lost cause, and that reconciling my internal conflict required real action. Telling my parents I was no longer Catholic was one of the hardest things I ever did, and I am no longer close with them.

So, to sum it up: someone who identifies as both gay and Muslim should not be an object of ridicule by default. Everyone’s experience with religion is different. I hope this gives you a new perspective; sometimes things are not as simple as they seem. The article describes a pretty impressive con job, which was realistic enough to last for years…

Least bigoted g*mer LMFAO

Invidious, one good instance is https://iv.nowhere.moe/

My experience so far as a new user, which might be a little redundant but here goes:

• Overall, there is a balance to work out between security, decentralization and FOSS, and anonymity.
• for the average user, using sandboxed google play is pretty much essential. Otherwise you’ll spend days trying to figure out why you aren’t getting notifications, why certain integrations aren’t working, etc. Notifications especially are just painful without google FCM. HOWEVER, I do not believe it is mandatory to sign in to your Google account for notifications to work, so you could in theory avoid signing in at all and still take advantage of FCM.
• multiple profiles don’t make sense for my use case (and possibly most people). Graphene does advertise the use case of having banking apps on a separate profile, but after attempting to do just that I believe it is a very niche use case that would actually benefit from it. Obviously a great tool to have for privacy and security, but not something you’ll went to use everyday.
• For the move away from Imessage, it is indeed kinda painful and still ongoing. The simple fact is that people are super weird about switching from I message, and honestly going straight to Signal was a no-go for many of my contacts. I’ve had to settle for WhatsApp, Telegram, and even Discord… I just have had to accept that the transition will take time. I’ve weighed that privacy issue against the privacy gain of GrapheneOS itself, and the benefits of supporting a 3rd party OS option, and I still believe using Graphene is better overall. And, once people get used to using a 3rd party app vs Imessage, in a couple years the jump to Signal will be no problem at all.
• banking apps are super painful. That being said, here is an opportunity to vote with your wallet… Support apps that don’t require invasive system access for “security”. For me, the biggest eye opener was that there are NO GENERIC THIRD PARTY TAP TO PAY PROVIDERS IN THE US. It is only Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, or Google Wallet. And, as is pointed out on the Graphene user guide, 3rd party apps are allowed to implement their own NFC payment system, but the extremely vast majority simply choose to use Wallet or Apple Pay. This is obviously rather scary as more and more retailers use these systems, and I’ve realized I would gladly support and use any alternative at this point. Without Graphene, I would have never even thought about it.

Seems like it needs a good old fashioned review bombing… https://www.amazon.com/Unhumans-Secret-History-Communist-Revolutions/dp/1648210856

So, basically shitposting poisons AI training. Good to know 👍

Is this secure drive erasure 🤔🤔🤔

If you are experience flickering in apps and your windowing system is Wayland, there is likely a fix coming this month in the next NVIDIA patch. And, Gnome and KDE either already have or are working on their side. Here’s a good jumping off point to understand why Nvidia support for Linux is essentially incomplete until this gets flowed out to all users: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Explicit-GPU-Sync-XWayland-Go

Gamescope is a Valve thing that is also related, helps make stuff work on Linux

TL;DR It uses the Matrix protocol to make every post E2E encrypted in the same way a Matrix chat is. Except they added more separation between people in the “Circles” functionality. Instead of everyone seeing all content like in a chat room, you have to invite people to follow your timeline. And only those people who have been invited can see your posts, and vice versa. I’m not sure he said it specifically, but it was implied that unless people have invited each other to see their posts, they can’t interact with each other in the same circles (he used an example of two people not liking each other and both being able to see a 3rd person’s timeline, but not each others timeline/posts). So essentially it offers encryption and social media like usage but with a sane privacy stance…aka nobody can find you via stalking your mutuals and nobody can just google and DM you out of the blue. Basic photo and sharing is available, apparently improving those features is what is planned for this year. You can also self host it if you wanted, as it just runs off a Matrix server (although they currently provide a US and Europe matrix server run by the FUTO company that funds the app development). Looks like they plan on charging for storage space (1.99$/month for 10GB is what it says in the app right now), and I’m not sure how much storage you get for free.

Yeah thankfully that’s the only part of the metaphor that holds… american evangelicals are about as far from a hardened warrior society as you can get…