I’ve tried and tried and tried, turns out the vast majority of people, including ones who theoretically would be into this, are beat down & atomized to the point where their primary goal in life is to not have to adjust their personal trajectory in any way, shape, or form, until they absolutely fucking have to on pain of death. 🤷

and then the ones who are actually into realistic prepping and want to work with others are batshit fucking crazy, but I think that might have something to do with my sample size of n=1 after trying to collaborate on shit like this for over a decade.

edit: it also doesn’t help that I’m autistic with a literal night watchman / jumpy cat phenotype, and have been unable to access sufficient solitude to function for nearly a decade, so I myself am sufficiently beat down & atomized that developing community comes lower in my priority queue than getting access to any precious scrap of solitude I can, in a constant losing battle to meet my basic sensory needs 🤷

My solution has been to spend time getting my gear in order, learning practical skills, and perhaps developing a spiritual practice such as meditation.

Anybody got a summary of the drama I smell behind this?

It was very easy to dump the community or two I subscribed to on that instance.

Bye ✌️

Edit:

but at least on Reddit there is more actual human content.

lol. lmao even

WPA and WPA2 gear still has plenty of vulnerabilities.

WiFi 6 has made this a lot more viable than it used to be. I’ve done a fair amount of parking lot leeching and new gear is worth it.

Back when I was housing insecure but still had a place of my own to live, I first set up a point-to-point wifi link to some kids across the street to defray my internet expenses - they paid part of my bill instead of having their own internet. That was more than a decade ago and the hardware & software weren’t so reliable. When the arrangement fell apart and I no longer could pay the bill, I cracked the network of some neighbors in my building and used the same antenna to provide internet for myself and 3 others in my house for about a year. The neighbors were a nice young couple so I did my best to be decent about it - set up an always-on permanent VPN and used flow control to limit our max throughput.

It’s still possible to do this, and I’m still broke, so after a few years not needing to do any such thing, I cracked a network to have internet during a housesitting gig (house did not have internet).

Edit: get WiFi 6 or better gear for this. Trust me, the improvement in performance in marginal situations is well worth it. WiFi 6 was a big improvement over WiFi 5, which was a big improvement over WiFi 4, when it comes to staying connected and getting data across a dodgy link. I haven’t done much straight up piracy lately but I have done plenty of leeching in parking lots, and WiFi 6 gear is absolutely worth the money.

Pirating wifi doesn’t preclude any of this. See also the GL.iNet devices, such as the GL-MT3000.

Voip dot ms employs a ton of countermeasures versus skript kiddies as voip fraud is a severe problem. You are unlikely to have much luck with Tor Browser. I have to ask them to take my boring data center IP off their greylist every time I want to add cash to my balance.

try voip dot ms

Save yourself a lot of trouble and get a hardware SIP phone like the Grandstream WP826. I spent years struggling with software phones, most of them suck ass and the good ones aren’t very good.

quick unboxing video

Then make sure to enable voice transport encryption and set SIP transport to TLS (not UDP) and set keepalive timers to something below 3 minutes or so. The encryption settings are not just for security, using TLS for SIP transport has way fewer problems with incoming calls than UDP in 2025 network environments.

There are some firmware issues with the Grandstream WP826 but they are steadily releasing new firmware updates every month or two. If you need absolute bulletproof reliability go for something more expensive, otherwise the WP826 or similar model will likely be good enough (I say that as someone who is easily vexed by shitty software/electronics)

ArchiveBox strikes me as being a rickety pile of hacks, but it does mostly do its job out of the box. The built-in search is abysmal however and must be replaced with one of the other options to be useful.

allowing Instagram is like rolling out the red carpet for the vampire as a method of inviting it in, and then maybe having the kids lie down so their bare necks are on a silver platter.

Another aspect of UPS, they may not like the dirty power from a small gas generator and spend some of their time discharging while the generator is on. They can be pretty sensitive to frequency especially.

There have in fact been huge discussions of this in the past, which maybe you’d already know about if you didn’t come in hot mouthing off about how things need to be changed to fit your preferences immediately, chop chop!

Turns out the type of blocking you want requires a great deal more code than you (clearly) can imagine in order to be actually functional, as opposed to a fig leaf requiring the full cooperation of every server involved.

This was discussed ad nauseam maybe about 5 years ago, with long hellthreads in microblogging fedi, complex deep-dive technical blog posts, the whole nine yards. No I didn’t save links and I wish I had because this and related issues (Mastodon’s fig leaf “privacy” settings, E2EE DMs) keep coming up.

The answer is that what you are asking for can either be implemented as a porous fig leaf which falls apart the very first time some asshole spins up an instance which doesn’t respect it and vacuums up your posts en masse, or it can be implemented using cryptography which requires an enormous amount of work by extremely well-educated CompSci types to implement a standard, and then implement code libraries, and only then can the developers of platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon get started on implementing the actual feature. No one is paying anyone to do this, and it’s not clear that people with the necessary expertise are even available to develop the standard and the code, nor is it clear that everyone would adopt it if they did. So up til now, it hasn’t been done.

If I block someone on Mastodon or another Fediverse microblogging instance, they’re blocked. Because that part of the Fediverse was built by people who had been harassed and doxxed off other platforms.

Evidently you missed the many (many) discussions that took place maybe 5 years ago by some of those exact builders about how this is, and remains, only a fig leaf which requires every server to cooperate in maintaining the illusion.

I wish I’d saved links based on how often this comes up. There are fundamental issues with how federated systems in general and ActivityPub in particular work, and “real” blocking is one of them. People running other instances can modify the code however they want, and no technical measures have been implemented (because it turns out to be very difficult to do so) to prevent any node operator from removing the fig leaf.

Including Germany, which has draconian laws against criticizing Israel’s genocidal actions and fascist regime, as demonstrated by the recent drama over feddit.org?

Laws aren’t identical across the EU. If you are aggregating content from a bunch of instances, there will be content aggregated that’s illegal in one place and not another.

If you can stomach bitcoin bros, check out Nostr, it works more like this.

But I don’t like them and don’t want them in my feed.

Mass-market slop troughs exist for a reason.