Reddit heard we have a fediverse chick.
vaguerant
joined 5 months ago
It's true this is a thing that you can do, but the experience seems pretty degraded vs. just registering an account with a Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed/Sublinks (did I miss any?) instance which is natively configured for the kind of threaded conversations that exist on this segment of the fediverse. The instructions basically amount to "Go to a Lemmy instance and use its interface to find a community you're interested in, then copy the link to the discussion you want to interact with and paste that into your Mastodon instance's search bar, then reply to the post that appears. It's that simple!"
If you only interact with threads occasionally or you just want to try it out from Mastodon, this is workable, but you need a lot of patience for the busywork that's involved.
I use Matrix daily but I would hesitate to recommend giving it to children unless you're able to set it up in such a way that they only have access to the rooms you configure--I don't think any Matrix apps have parental control settings but I've never checked.
Matrix has kind of miserable moderation options. Mods can't do basic things like disabling attachments, which makes it prone to NSFL/NSFW image spam. The official automod bot, Mjolnir, can mitigate this somewhat, but can be pretty easily gamed. e.g. It tries to prevent image spam by deleting messages that have an image if they're the first message a user sends in the channel--so spammers just send a message to highlight everybody first, then the images.
When there's nothing that needs moderating, Matrix is great. However, it is severely lacking in ways to handle abuse. If you're in a community that's being targeted by bad actors (like Jared Leto), you basically just have to deal with it; there's very little you can do proactively.
In this case, the goose didn't even need numbers. The eagle eventually gave up the fight and flew away. Something something, don't start a fight you can't finish.
Only if you do it anonymously at some kind of blood donor glory hole.
The Leta FAQ confirms this:
Did you make your own search engine from scratch? We did not, we made a front end to the Google and Brave Search APIs.
Our search engine performs the searches on behalf of our users. This means that rather than using Google or Brave Search directly, our Leta server makes the requests.
Searching by proxy in other words.
If all you're doing is "unchecking" then there's more you're missing:
https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Data-Collection
The whole advanced configuration settings in about:config are probably never seen by the majority of users. Ultimately though, you're right: for the most part, privacy-focussed forks aren't offering anything that you couldn't manually configure for yourself in mainline Firefox, assuming you have the time, energy and interest.
Certainly, if you're in the habit of policing all of these relatively undocumented flags with each update to be sure you haven't been opted in to any telemetry you don't know about and assuming that all of it remains optional, you're absolutely unaffected. However, they now have a license to everything you do within Firefox which they state they will only use to "help" you. Does training their AI model to make targeted suggestions to users count as "helping"?
On another note, taking back a promise not to sell users' data, even if your personal data is protected because you rigorously police the about:config page, is not something many people are enthusiastic about. Just because I'm safe, doesn't mean everybody else is.
If you're accustomed to using Reddit via Android, you might like the app Stealth (download from F-Droid, source code at GitLab). It's a privacy-focussed Reddit scraper/client with no account support. I don't interact with Reddit any more, but on the rare occasion that I want to check on a community there, it does the job. You can bookmark communities you want to follow and get a feed, all the standard stuff you'd expect to do, besides logging in.