I expect this will be a controversial take but hear me out. I think it’s futile, to an extent, to fight against so-called echo chambers since it’s so ingrained in human tribal nature that the alternative ends up being worse for us. Having some key points of consensus is not necessarily all bad, it mirrors how socialising works in the real world, where people tend to connect with like-minded people, groups of people may not agree on everything but usually have some core values in common that tie them together (note, I still think that Lemmy has less of these types of values in common than most real world friendship groups, but it’s closer to it).

On the other hand, throwing everyone together on the same corporate social media platform is something recent and unnatural. People don’t have respectful debates and listen to each other there, they argue, get angry, and dig deeper into their beliefs. For example I would never have made a comment on Reddit, like this one, that I think might be slightly against the grain of the thread since you just get shouted down by defensive people who have already made up their minds. Here on Lemmy I don’t expect everyone to agree with me all the time but I believe they might at least listen, so I feel freer to express myself, then again I do have some core values in common with most people here which is what enables that.

Never a good idea to use a computer with the preinstalled operating system whether new or used. Always do a clean install, then you know exactly what’s on it.

You could use something like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed where all software is updated on a rolling basis whenever updates are tested and ready. That might be for you but the downside is that big updates to software come “randomly” and could break your workflow. The point of version releases is usually to save the big feature-changing updates so they all come at a predictable point in time, and there’s usually a window to upgrade in so you can do it when most convenient. For Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. this happens every six months, so the difference between one version to the next isn’t likely to be huge, but many people prefer the predictability of an update cycle. You could also look at LTS distros which are supported for longer, but you have to wait longer for features.

I get a lot of value from YouTube that I would happily pay for, and I already pay for online services that respect me but I wouldn’t pay a company that treats users like they do. It’s not the ads I have a problem with, it’s the tracking of users. They could have ads on their website that don’t track users. You can subscribe to premium and presumably they don’t show you ads, but they still track you. If they didn’t do that I would happily pay them.

YouTube has ads?

Based on experience I’ve always found the Fedora community very helpful and knowledgeable, I wouldn’t exactly say humming with with activity on the discussion forums but maybe the best quality to quantity ratio and not much drama.

Oh fair enough, I’ll re-examine some of that information. I don’t think I’m completely wrong. Advice on not installing extensions to avoid adding to the fingerprint comes from the official Mullvad FAQ. The philosophy of making all users look the same to blend in is something inherited from Tor Browser.

Mullvad also uses resist fingerprinting, yes canvas is unique every attempt. The EFF cover your tracks test doesn’t penalise you for it, if you’re coming up as unique there it’s not because of that (some tests out there do though and Mullvad fails them). Having a randomised canvas itself may count as one data point I guess.

Mullvad Browser:

Your browser has a non-unique fingerprint

Within our dataset of several hundred thousand visitors tested in the past 45 days, only one in 1041.72 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.

For comparison if I test in Firefox (configured as I was previously using) I get:

Your browser has a unique fingerprint

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 304,204 tested in the past 45 days.

“Strong” protection means that your browser is configured to protect against tracking, both come back as strong here, but as far as I can tell that doesn’t take into account tracking through fingerprinting. You’re right, you don’t want a unique fingerprint.

When you customise and add extensions to your browser, you add to its fingerprint so even privacy extensions can be counterproductive. The way Mullvad Browser works is that because it comes ready configured for privacy with various privacy extensions (including UBo) installed by default you don’t have to make changes. While this doesn’t give you a “common” fingerprint exactly (hence “only one in 1041.72 browsers”), it makes you look like all the other Mullvad Browsers so there’s safety in numbers. There are a few more nuances to it than that but that’s basically the idea, and it’s a balancing act, you could be less unique than that but you would need to make other compromises.

The catch is that you shouldn’t try to configure Mullvad Browser yourself since that negates the benefit; you have to be able to live with the browser as it is out of the box which may mean sacrificing some of your favourite extensions.

I would say don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, if you have a problem with Mozilla as an organisation it doesn’t negate the valid concerns about the monopoly, it would effectively hand control of web standards over to Google defeating the entire ethos of the open web. The Firefox browser engine is independent even if you don’t believe the organisation behind it is, that can be verified because of open source, there’s no need to be defeatist yet.

Daily driving Mullvad Browser now, it’s Firefox based and has strong anti-fingerprinting and privacy defaults - it does break some sites though and is missing some QoL features but that’s the price you pay.

I deleted my comment fir a reason 🤨

Comment deletion doesn’t always federate straight away, I can still see it.

Answer me this, what chromium browser today is good??

I don’t use Chromium browsers because they’re at the verge of becoming a monopoly, it’s important to use alternatives for the foreseeable future to sustain what’s left of diversity.

It depends on your point of view, of the ones I’ve seen I’d guess Vivaldi has the best user features but it’s closed source so there’s double reason to not use it. It’s what I’d use if I didn’t care about any of this. But if you want my genuine browser recommendation from a Privacy perspective (since this is the privacy community) I suggest Mullvad Browser, it’s Firefox based and has strong anti-fingerprinting and privacy defaults - it does break some sites though and is missing some QoL features but that’s the price you pay.

Oh yes, it would be even worse if we only had one browser engine. We need more browser engines is the point, not more tweaked Chromium browsers.

Can’t tell if you’re joking but the problem is serious lack of competition for Chromium browsers. Every Chromium browser brings nothing meaningfully new but just strengthens Google’s monopoly.

As the person who made the (currently highest upvoted) comment about not needing a new Chromium browser, could you enlighten me on what I should know about “today’s industry”?

Don’t see the point, the world doesn’t need another Chromium browser.

OK, not at all what I expected…

That was part of the joke I was trying to make but I can see it was a miss since people didn’t get the reference, never mind! It’s on me.

I was a bit confused as to what you meant; image browsing apps to me are things like EOG/Loupe, Gwenview, or whatever Apple/Microsoft use for that now. So you’re looking for a social media platform for sharing images, not software for browsing images? What is thirst content?

I wouldn’t want to watch anything for more than a couple of minutes of a phone screen, too inconvenient to have to hold all the time. Laptop is the most convenient, even laying in bed - because it stands up on its own.