Digital Privacy

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With corporations like Google, Facebook, Discord, etc. taking over more and more of people's lives, the issue of digital privacy is becoming more and more relevant.

This is a community for anything related to digital privacy. From discussing the violation of digital privacy, to discussing technical details of solutions to digital privacy issues.

founded 2 years ago
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Since most people don't have the resources or knowledge to host their own servers, this post will provide recommendations for increasing digital privacy without self-hosting. If anyone can think of something to add, please comment and I will edit the post.


Alternatives to big tech services

This section will list alternatives to common big tech software that steals your data.

  • Discord: Matrix; Easy to use clients: Nheko, Element
  • Github: Codeberg
  • Twitter: Mastodon
  • YouTube: LBRY; Easy to use clients: LBRY Desktop, Odysee
  • Google Search: SearX/SearXNG; List of public instances: https://searx.space/
  • Windows: Any Linux distribution. Seriously, don't use Windows. Linux isn't as hard as people say it is. My parents and grandparents use it.
  • Google Chrome: Firefox. Do not use Chrome, it is one of the worst things that exists for privacy. Chromium (the open-source version of Chrome) is a little better but I still wouldn't use it.

Suggestions for privacy-respecting hardware

Suggestions for privacy-respecting software

  • TOR: Encrypts your traffic in three layers, then routes across a randomized network of nodes, providing very high security and privacy, and making it near impossible to track your activities.
  • Mullvad VPN: VPN that allows you to make an account without providing any details, and pay in cash or crypto (or just with a card) to ensure your identity cannot be found out since it's not even known by Mullvad.
  • LibreWolf: Browser focused on privacy and security. May break some sites, especially streaming sites like Netflix, Hulu, etc. Broken sites can be fixed by changing settings at the expense of some privacy if required.
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My needs are simple:

  • not a libshit hellhole
  • federates with other cool instances and mastodon.social cuz that's the biggest one
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There is no apt tech sub on Lemmygrad, and this issue is an annoyance to many right now, I believe, especially during downtime.

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Written by yours truly, enjoy. Education is also important for your computing life.

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I've recently downloaded mullvad. I heard it's popular in the piracy community. 5 dollars a month is not bad. Currently saving for a good antivirus. What are your favorites?

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Now that I have started this community off with a non-technical post, I will share my own, personal solution to digital privacy. This post will be more technical.

I self-host every service I possibly can from a cluster of servers (mostly low-power ARM SBCs) that are in my room. Until recently, I was just manually throwing services onto servers and then manually configuring everything. As I've mentioned before in a GenZedong General Discussion Thread, I am now using an orchestrator called Nomad as well as a service discovery solution called Consul.

This allows me to submit a single configuration file, and my servers all automatically configure themselves to perform whatever task I wanted them to. I've placed all my configuration files along with relatively detailed READMEs about them into this repository if anyone wants to take a look at them: https://gitea.arsenm.dev/Arsen6331/nomad.

Due to using SBCs, I am able to do all of this with a power consumption of just 50W.

Here is a list of things I host and what they're meant to replace:

There are more but they're not really alternatives to anything, I'll list them here:

  • Authelia: Provides authentication and 2fa for services that don't provide their own mechanism. Can also work similarly to "Sign in with Google" buttons via OAuth2 and OIDC.
  • Traefik: Reverse proxy that provides access to all the rest
  • Homer: Provides a dashboard for all my services. My instance can be found at: https://dashboard.arsenm.dev/