I have tried every possible set up, I’ve got to say that the best one so far for me is sychthing + Koreader: dead simple, no databases, synchs annotations and highlights as well, books are simply epub files + metadata.

Aka no dealing with exports, database corruption or stuff like that.

Break free from Google by giving your money to Google!

After how much time? I was banned because of using third party client, I did the kyc process at the time because I wanted to delete the account but still I could not access…

It’s been years for me and they didn’t delete it yet.

lovely

That’s something to do while we still can, Instagram doesn’t let me delete my own account :/ Tried reaching the support multiple times, I’ve been completely ignored

Oh well all of this explains why I sometimes get instagram ADS which are relevant to me on my work phone even if I looked for stuff on my PC browser or smartphone (all using adblocks, deegogled android, private DNS, tracker blockers, private browsers and other preventive measures).

I didn’t realize they could literally track you probabilistically or they could tie different devices to you…

So essentially if I use my amazon account on the same PC (or on a device tied to me) that I use for looking at “cat food” I am screwed and they will know I have a cat and amazon will start advertising cat stuff to me?

I did know they tracked you, but I thought it had to be a consistent set of datas: accounts, unprotected browsing, keeping cookies for a long time etc etc… I didn’t know they could probabilistically try to catch you nor that they could so reliably tie devices togheter… I would like to know more about what they can actually do and what are preventive measures that actually works…

For example: can they (and how) get over tracker blockers? VPNs? Proxies? Private DNS? Degoogled devices/Linux?

What I’ve got to do if I want to be on the internet preserving my privacy? Should I literally stop using the internet? Should I use devices on which I do not login on a normal account ever and just use my self hosted stuff or the federated web?

And what about all the data they already have on me, it will be their’s forever??

This is getting ridiculous, we need new solutions, the internet as we now know it is completely screwed.

How can they tie it to me tho? Or use it against me? Especially if behind ddg “proxy”

In my experience matrix is a total mess with plenty of bugs, also uses quite a lot server resources. xmpp is lighter, easier to set up and works flawlessly, and seem also easier to proxy or do stuff like that with it. Calls are kinda messy to set up tho.

What do you mean by “shadow profile”?

It’s simply another case where we have amazing technologies but we lack the right ways to use them, that’s what our culture does: creating amazing techs that can solve lots of human problems and then discarding the part that actually solves a problem unless it’s also profitable for the individual.

It literally is a problem of people wanting to submit other people for power games, that’s not how all societies work, but that’s a foundation for ours, but we’re playing this game so much that we almost broke the console (planet earth and our own bodies health).

It’s an anthropological problem, not a technological one.

What is Kagi? Is it an extension?

I have been thinking about it for quite a long time, my dream is a linux e ink minimal smartphone, i think it would be the right mix between convenience, freedom and minimalism

I couldn’t make it work whatever I did, whichever instance I used it seemed to get rate limited after a while or showing weird results…

I guess getting a flip phone and stick to an eBook reader would be a good solution

At least if you just do phone calls the attack surface is reduced… They can scan your calls maybe, but not your entire chat history with all of your contacts and give it to an AI which could profile you based on that + you are not scanned on everything else you do on your phone / locked into proprietary ecosystems.

The ideal would just be using a Linux platform and using something like xmpp, but who are you gonna convince to use it? People use what they are used to use, if it’s not popular messaging apps is phone calls… And now it seems a more private alternative…

OK I’m getting a flip phone

Xmpp, IRC, Matrix, all great decentralized alternatives, but good luck convincing people in contacting you on Xmpp…

This problem is a problem because it’s a social tendency, not because we don’t have alternatives… Very sadly…

The AI thing is very cool, I think something like that exists, agentic browsers.

But I am scared this would be just the next abstraction, of this chains of abstractions… Corporations are already using AI to profile you even further, the internet will definitely adapt under this pressure, and I believe that in a few years agentic browsers will just become the new norm.

Search engine at first were more objective, now people have learnt to play the game of SEO to attract views, search engines have started to show targeted results, and stuff like Searx came out, or Yaci, claiming to get back a more objective web. There always have been ways to filter out or to try being more objective, but I think the evidence have shown that as a social momentum, this stuff doesn’t work.

Yeah Yaci (self hosted crawler) is a great project, but it’s stagnant, and the prevalence is still a shitty google or bing searche engine, and this is true for other aspects of the web.

Social media? There were more independent social medias while centralized stuff was rampant, now there’s the fediverse and decentralization. Which is super super beautiful, but most people are just unaware. The social momentum is not saying that we are going towards a world where every little server will be connected to other little servers and decide in which parts integrate one another, that would be great, and I’d love to see that, but it’s simply not where we are currently going as a society.

Now it’s the turn of AI, it can be a helpful tool for a while to avoid it all, stuff like agentic browsers can give us some freedom for a while when they will be actually usable and reliable, but in that time the web will have evolved again and pheraps we’ll need to take into account new ways to defend ourselves or to look through the bushes.

It’s a never ending hide and seek unless something really big changes. Linux, free software, open source is all great, but we are continuously pushed towarbalance mainstream in some way or another. And most people live the mainstream, not in the alternative, despite the alternative being objectively better. It is just unsupported by our culture.

It’s an abstraction built on another abstraction built on another abstraction… And the web is just the most clear example of that, I mean the very languages in which the web is built are an example itself: JS (which already is high level)>React>Next. You see? Abstraction on abstraction.

But when will we stop to play games and just stay in the present? Focusing on the core of things?

Do we strive to get to a sort of technological ecstatic point in which all will actually be clear? A sort of technological philosopher stone? And the way to do that is through collection of loads and loads of human data?

My perspective on this is quite pessimistic, because it’s a form of cruel optimism to say that one can solve this problem individually. To change this would require a coordination of consumers, programmers and people revolving around all things of the internet to fix it, unless we assume that AI is somehow sentient and can be better at solving our problems than we do, which I do not exclude: faster and better at looking and processing novelty than we are.

But that will mean that us, as humans, will just be obsolete.

I always come to the conclusion that the web maybe it’s not worth getting used as it is right now, and maybe to feel good we should stop trying to relate to machines and instead just living our own biological needs… Focusing on beings which we can understand better… Living in the present… And stop running, whether it means running away, or towards. Rejecting culture and just staying in our own spaces, cultivating simplicity and balance.

Sorry for the philosophycal rant lmao, I guess this was just more than a technical problem for me lmao, but thanks for your answer!

Slowly switch to Linux devices, or dumb phone, and learning to adapt happily living without some features, but also without control and censorship :)

As far as I knew reverse proxies could only reverse proxy stuff coming in from 443 or 80, I didn’t know they could listen other ports as well!

Main reason why I was using a reverse proxy at first is because I had everything behind cloudflare, and cloudflare can only proxy and give you an SSL encryption for stuff that goes through 443, so I could make Caddy listen to 443 and then forward to interested ports.

But this leaves out everything that needs to go in some other places than 443, and requires its own standalone ssl certificate, which is a bit cumbersome. Pheraps these can be proxied with other proxies than cloudflare, hopefully giving SSL to everything…

I’m not sure I understood the upstream ssh thing, what do you actually do?