Gunther

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.

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.

I agree with most of the suggestions here, but I'm not sure why Telegram, a proprietary application that is not E2EE by default (and whose encryption is their own standard anyway) is touted as a privacy-friendly chat app alternative.

"Trying to build socialism." As with most professed communist societies, China is currently ruled by an elite class that suppresses the majority of the citizens. Surveillance capitalism is bad and I do try to avoid Google products to the extent reasonable, but the CCP is a much bigger threat to free speech and world peace. If you think they just want to control China (which includes Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc. in their eyes), you're deluding yourself.

Good concept with a lot of solid content, but I'll just stick to watching compilations instead of downloading a CCP spyware app, thank you.