This also made me chuckle. 10/10 comment.

Speaking of Dr. Pepper, try the Strawberries & Cream Zero Sugar flavor, it's bomb

Carl's Jr. - Fuck you! Im eating.

Appreciate this.

That's how classic Reddit was for me.

Mods who are extremely rigid to the rules had to exist when the spammers went crazy. But with smaller communities, modding should be based on vibes. You get better conversations that way.

11/10 mod behavior

linux/communism is mostly a package deal these days

If I ever start selling any software I'll gladly market it on Lemmy, but only because it would be a privacy preserving alternative to some enshittified existing service.

Yep. This here

They pussied out

Not being able to host my web apps made it a no for me

They were on Boston's T stations as well a couple months ago. Maybe they target cities specifically, I haven't seen any outside tech industry centers.

I was surprised to see Mullvad ads on the Link. Pleasantly surprised, at that!

It's reached a point where the government is pushing for websites to card you before you can enter.

Women apps were giving data so the government can arrest women for abortion-like behavior.

We're already at the point where privacy/anonymity is the only way to visit the internet.

Tailscale is a VPN in the classic sense, I e. to build a secure network over an insecure one. Mullvad is a service to hide your public IP address and switch from having to trust your ISP to having to trust Mullvad.

I too have a subscription to one of the latter services, but I always find them sketchy

They never try to lure me into buying more/bigger/better like pretty much every company does now.

Windscribe enters the chat.

Biggest mistake I ever made was signing up for them. just the constant daily emails trying to be "funny" to get me to return.

Honestly that sounds great. I'm kind of annoyed how often NordVPN keeps emailing me and trying to upsell me on the daily.

The service is fine overall. But the nonstop promotion, along with it being a US company that can easily just give all their info to the US government, makes me wanting to switch pronto.

I pay for mine with vouchers, just as convenient as a credit card as long as you renew ahead of time, and just as anonymous as cash.

Wish I could buy them somewhere other than amazon though.

I'm going back to Europe for a few months for a visit. I was looking at other VPNs and they were offering me cheap discounts but I'd have to sign up for 2 years or some shit. Mullvad was very straightforward in their pricing and I was able to generate the VPN config and I have it installed on my travel router really easily.

Here's the thing. The reason ads are bad is because almost every single one is for a product that will exploit the user. Mullvad is a product that does the opposite. They ask for money, but don't force it. They intend to give power of the user's life back to the user. Thus, some ads are actually okay. Ads about VPNs, self hosted systems, anti-corporate anticapitalist services, software that is for you to use and only ever takes telemetry for software improvement, and then only if you consent first.

Hell, before this garbage, on TV the only ads were products and charities, and everybody grew really sick of the African child ads because its sole purpose was to exploit the viewer's empathy and get their money. Same with now, except if it's not money they want it's data, and data is money to them.

I've never had a problem with ads made in this way. My only complaint would be it looks like an actual post. Even though OP is just sharing it, a filterable tag, like we have for nsfw, would be nice.

This form of "passive marketing" (I'm making up terms), I.e a random picture in the feed that you can easily scroll past is fine (assuming its marked appropriately and there are not too many). If the post catches attention enough that people start sharing it because they liked it, the marketer has done a good job. I also consider banner ads "passive". If they actually filter out the scams and malware, and if someone wants to sponsor Rod's Radical Recipes with a banner ad, who cares.

I do take issue with I'll call active marketing. This is an ad you're forced to engage with, like an unmutable gas pumps that's playing audio, a commercial break or a pre-roll add. If I'm getting something for free, then sure an add or two seems reasonable (well, 15 years ago it did), but I'm already paying for the gas, shut the fuck up and let me enjoy my 3 minutes of stress watching the numbers go up without some guy screaming about beef jerky.

Edit: reworded the second paragraph, definitely didn't look at the background too quick and think it was a real poster somewhere and talk about random posters on a wall...nope defiantly not.

Or just a San Francisco resident

these ads are everywhere on BART (+Muni I guess) right now. (As far as ads go, they're pretty good I guess

and no, I don't even use them, much less work for them.)