There is no guarantee unless you could personally audit their facilities and inspect what they did with your account etc. But I would still choose one that states they have a good policy versus one that says nothing on the subject.

What about logging policies? Seems like that would be an important category to visit - which providers store logs or don’t etc. I’ve heard of some that use RAM-only logging that allegedly never gets stored on disk.

Self-hosters are probably the type of people who are interested in getting away from “big tech” corporate solutions for everything, so it makes sense that they would prefer Fediverse versions

You don’t have to host your whole family’s library though. You can start with whatever you want and be on the road to improving your setup.

MP3 players aren’t bad, they’re just mostly obsolete when smartphones can do the same thing and we mostly already have one.

I like to keep several GB of music on my phone from my MP3 library, and I have no streaming music accounts. I pay once for my music at most.

Another thing VLC can do that some might not be aware of is downloading streaming media to file for storage. If you can find the right stream URL, VLC can save whatever that is to MP4 or your format of choice. Save your favorite shows / streams / podcasts to disk and keep them safe in your own personal media server!

That’s true but it’s not in the same ballpark as GPS tracking. The phone company knows what county I’m in but probably not what businesses and municipal buildings I enter on foot unlike GPS location services. Bluetooth and Wifi are also disabled when I leave the house to minimize those being used for device tracking.

It’s just good practice to disable all the unused wireless radios in your pocket computer. Don’t turn them on until you need them on. It saves a lot of battery life too.

My kids don’t even have phones, as they do not need them and they are unhealthy for the young brain’s development.

I also don’t use location services on my phones. Fuck all that tracking bullshit.

Nope, that is not correct. The rights remain in place and may be exercised at will.

The people are armed as well.

That’s not true, because the Constitution applies to the whole place. Americans and non-citizens freely exercise those rights in those areas daily.

If any agent of the government tells you otherwise, you must educate them and enforce the free exercise of your own rights.

1st Amendment protections on freedom of speech apply to everyone in the USA, regardless of citizenship. Frenchman should sue.

Cool, I hadn’t heard of that. So instance admins can access their lists via API I see. Should be possible to “spam filter” federations that way at least.

Maybe this stuff can be expanded to include a spam list of bad users and links too, for Lemmy servers to parse via API and block.

Might be good to think about fediverse security similar to email security, as they are both federated information sharing systems. Email has spam blocking, allowing for reputation checks and other complex stuff. I wonder if Lemmy instances could collaborate on a SpamHaus type of bad host / bad user list to use and share.

That could possibly be true IF it were true that TikTok is the only place you can talk about that, but it’s not. Have a look around.

No, and I wouldn’t want it to. I have plenty of space on my server anyway.

That is not true, it is completely possible with systems like Nextcloud and Owncloud. I have one set up at home and it’s great.

The phone app auto-uploads your chosen pics directory’s contents to your chosen cloud backup folder on a schedule or any time you want. And it’s free software.

Generally with android custom ROMs including GrapheneOS, you will need to make sure your cell service and data is working properly on stock android first. Things like VoLTE provisioning need to be done on stock OS for some reason.

Basically if everything with cellular talk / text / data works on stock, it’s probably good to go for upgrading to custom ROMs. VoLTE provisioning can be checked with a secret dialpad code I don’t remember at the moment.

I’ve had 2 phones with GrapheneOS and never heard of those issues before.

Your first comment was right: no phone