they also have the potential to cause great harm to their users

What harm is that?

The only harm I can see is either:

(a) by associating their users with those who use VPNs to do illegal things. Which is a nonsense association and shouldn’t be given any weight, or

(b) if they do keep logs and turn those over to authorities. Which is why companies that have been audited and shown not to collect logs, or, even better, companies that have been tested in court and unable to comply with requests for information, are the VPN providers that should be preferred.

I’m not sure I buy this logic. It smacks of “if you haven’t got anything to hide, you don’t have anything to worry about” reasoning, to me. There are numerous reasons to use a VPN. For most people, that’s circumventing region blocks. Which is not illegal activity, though it may be against a company’s terms of service. For others, it’s to hide behaviour from snooping ISPs or—worse—governments, especially surrounding sensitive topics like GSM status, especially for people in less LGBTI±friendly countries.

And yeah, some people will do things that are actually illegal. Copyright infringement is probably the most popular, which I think most people on here would probably agree is not a major crime. But some smaller amount will use the privacy enabled by a VPN to do more severe crimes. I don’t know how you prevent that without limiting the privacy rights of the much larger number of users.

feddit.org is a German instance. The fact that they’re on that instance makes it pretty safe to assume they’re German, just as my instance makes it safe to assume I’m Australian.

(And incidentally, torrenting is pretty safe here in Australia. A court case years ago heavily restricted the ability of copyright owners to go after torrenters, requiring them to have reason to go after one individual in particular, blocking them from the sorts of mass attacks that make it commercially viable in the US and, seemingly, Germany.)

I have subscribed now, but it doesn’t seem to have pulled any old stuff. Just the newer posts, and the newer comments on the one older post I manually forced it to pull.

The problem with NewPipe is that it breaks the YouTube experience. ReVanced lets you use your YouTube account to get all the normal YouTube functionality such as liking and commenting, viewing your subscriptions (including syncing if you make a change) and, most importantly, syncing playlists such as the Watch Later playlist.

I’ve only had ReVanced break once since I started using it, way back when Vanced first died. So I don’t consider the “stuff breaks” element to be especially relevant.

Huh, weird. I think I’ve only had to reinstall it once since Vanced died and I switched to ReVanced.

Yeah, more or less.

But that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? Just because something’s being advertised in a lot of places, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad deal.

No need for the clumsy browser experience. Just download ReVanced.

and there’s definitely VPN providers I distrust less than those two

I find that a weird way to phrase it. Both Nord and Express are perfectly good. So is PIA, and probably more besides, but I didn’t mention others because those are the two I’ve frequently seen advertised. Both Nord and Express have passed security audits with flying colours, and Express even had a case where their servers were seized but the seizure was unable to be of any value to the authorities, because their claims of not keeping logs were true.

tbh I commented here in no small part to remind myself to check it out again when I’m back at my computer. Federation means on my phone (where accessing random other instances is more awkward) I don’t see anything in that community yet.

Cool! Love me some vampire media!

It’s a great general policy to have, but there are exceptions. NordVPN and ExpressVPN are both great VPN services, and Nebula has been absolutely fantastic.

Chef’s kiss is overrated?

Eat the rich

“The Vast Atlantic Ocean” is 😙🤌

I guess that’s possible, but it seems like a very strange way to do it.

I think more likely it’s a test of the resilience of the fediverse in preparation for a more valuable scam later, using whatever footage the person could get (not necessarily themselves, but not stalker or revenge, either).

Well, transphobes and Byzeboos.

What actually is it?

I think she’s having issues with fedi and remade her accounts or something

If by “having issues” you mean “got banned for spamming”, then I agree with you.

Why not accept that the PRC won the civil war and that the ROC lost without any further conflict

Because, at its most fundamental, I think looking at the world in terms of the bigger fish is a disgusting worldview. We should just let the strong rule? In that case, let’s go USA! Go pull out those nukes and use 'em on anyone who dares challenge your supremacy!

No, I would much rather live in a world where people can decide for themselves what they want, and where everyone else will help them achieve that if a bigger fish comes along to try and stop them.