#Google Apps migration

[opossumpitcher]

sooo anyways what are the memes around here right now? get me in the loop lol

[thegalleonsnest]

OK since I haven't seen too many people talk about this since twitter news usually strikes pretty fast over here whenever e'usk does anything ever, let me give ya'll the run down on two things that will go live on NOVEMBER 15TH and why people are mass migrating to Blue Sky once more; and provide resources to help protect your art and make the transition to Blue Sky easier if you so choose:

The Block function no longer blocks people as intended. It now basically acts as a glorified Mute button. Even when you block someone, they can still see your posts, but they can't engage in them. If your account is a Public one and not a Private one, people you blocked will see your posts.

They say because people can easily "share and hide harmful or private information about those they've blocked," they changed it this way for "greater transparency." When in reality, this is an extremely dangerous change, as the whole point of blocking is to cease interaction with people entirely for a plethora of reasons, i.e. stalking, harassment, spam, endangerment, or just plainly annoying and not wanting to see said tweets/accounts. or you know, for 18+ accounts who do not want minors interacting with them or their material at all (There is speculation saying these changes are specifically for Elon himself so he can do his own kind of stalking, and honestly, with the private likes change, it lowkey checks out in my opinion)

Also, this straight up goes against and may violate Apple and Google's app store policies and also is straight up illegal in Canada and probably other countries as well.

If this ACTUALLY goes through, twitter will only be available in select countries, probably exclusively in the US, which would collapse the site with the lost of users and stock, and probably be the last push it needs to kill the site. And if not, will be a very sad and exclusive platform made for specific kinds of people who line up with musk's line of thinking.

2. New policies regarding Grok AI and basically removing the option to opt out of Grok's information gathering to improve their software.

And anything you upload/post on the site is considered "fair game" with "royalty-free licenses" and they can do whatever they please with it. Primarily using any and all posts on twitter to train their Grok AI. A few months ago, there was a setting you can opt out of so they couldn't take anything you post to "improve" Grok, but I guess because so many people were opting out, they decided to make it mandatory as part of the policy change (This is mainly speculation from what I hear).

So this is considered the final straw for a LOT of people, especially artists who have been gripping on to twitter for as long as they can, but the AI nonsense is too much for people now, including myself. Lot's of people are moving to Blue Sky for good reason, and from personal experience, it is literally 10x better than twitter ever was, even before elon took over. There is no algorithm on there, and you can save "feeds" to your timeline to have a catered timelines to hop between if your looking for something specific like furry art or game dev stuff. It's taken them a bit to get off the ground and add much needed features, but it's genuinely so much better now

RESOURCES

Project Glaze & Cara

If you're an artist who's still on twitter or trying to ride it out for as long as you can for whatever reason you have, do yourself a favor and Glaze and/or Nightshade your work. Project Glaze is a free program designed to protect your art work from getting scrapped by AI machines. Glazing basically makes it harder to adapt and copy artwork that AI programs try to scan, while Nightshade basically "poisons" works to make AI libraries much more unstable and generate images completely off the mark. (These are layman's terms I'm using here, but follow the link to get more information)

The only problem with these programs is that they can be resource intensive for computers, and not every pc can run glaze. It's basically like rendering a frame/animation, you gotta let your pc sit there to get it glazed/nightshade, and depending on the intensity and power of your pc, this may take minutes to hours depending on how much you wanna protect your work.

HOWEVER, there are two alternatives, WebGlaze and Cara

WebGlaze is an in browser version of the program, so your pc doesn't have to do the heavy lifting. You do need to have an account with Glaze and be invited to use the program (I have not done so personally so I don't know much about the process.)

Cara is an artist focused site that doubles as both a portfolio site and a general social media platform. They've partnered with Glaze and have their own browser glazing called "Cara Glaze," and highly encourage users to post their work Glazed and are extremely anti-ai. You do get limited uses per day to glaze your work, so if you plan on doing a huge backlog uploading of your art, it may take awhile if your using just Cara Glaze.

Some twitter users have suggested glazing your art, cropping it, and overlaying it with a frame telling people to follow them elsewhere like on Bluesky. Here's a template someone provided if you wanna use this one or make your own.

Blue Sky Resources and Tips

So if your a twitter user and your about to realize the hellish task of refollowing a massive chunk of people you follow, have no fear, there's an extension called Sky Follower Bridge (Firefox & Chrome links). This is a very basic extension that makes it really easy to find people on Bluesky

It sorts them out by trying to find matching usernames, usernames in descriptions, or by screen name. It's not 100% perfect, there's a couple people I already follow on Blue Sky but the extension could not find them on twitter correctly, but I still found a huge chunk of people. Also if your worried that this extension is "iffy," they do have a github open with the source publicly available and the Blue Sky Team themselves have promoted the extension in their recent posts while welcoming new users to the platform.

FEEDS and LABELS

OK SO THE COOLEST PART ABOUT BLUESKY IS THE FEEDS SYSTEM. Basically if you've made a twitter list before, it's like that, but way more customizable and caters to specific types of posts/topics. Consolidating them into a timeline/feed that exclusively filled about those particular topics, or just people in general. There's thousands to pick and choose from!

Here's a couple of mine that I have saved and ready (down below). Some feeds I have saved so I can jump to seeing what my friends and mutuals are up to, and see their posts specifically so it doesn't get lost in reposts or other accounts, and also specialized feeds for browsing artists within the furry community.

The Furry Community feeds I have here were created by people who've built an algorithm to place any #furry or #furryart or other special tags like #Furrystreamer or #furrydev. They even have one for commissions, and yes you can say commissions on a post and not have it destroyed or shadow banned. You are safe.

If you want, and I highly recommend it to get visibility and check out a neat community, follow furryli.st to get added to their list and feeds. Once your on the list, even without a hashtag, you'll still pop up in their specialized feeds as just a member of the community there. There are plenty of other feeds out there besides this one, but I feel like a lot of people could use one like this. They even got ones for OC specific too I remember seeing somewhere.

And in terms of labels, they can be either ways to help label yourself with specific things or have user created accessibility settings to help better control your experience on Blue Sky.

And my personal favorite: Ai Imagery Labeler. Removes any AI stuff or hides it to the best of it's abilities, and it does a pretty good job, I have not seen anything AI related since subscribing to it.

Finally, HASHTAGS WORK & No need to censor yourself!

This is NOT like twitter or any other big named social media site AT ALL, so you don't have to work around words to get your stuff out there and be seen. There are literally feeds built around having commissions getting and art seen! Some people worry about bots and that has been a recent issue since a lot of people are migrating to Blue Sky, but it comes with any social media territory.

ALSO COOL PART,

you can search a hashtag on someone's profile and search exclusively on that profile as well! You can even put the hashtag in bio for easy access if you have a specialize tag like here on tumblr. OR EVEN BUILD YOUR OWN ART FEED FOR YOUR STUFF SPECIFICALLY!

So yeah, there's your quick run down about twitter's current burning building, how to protect your art, and what to do when you move to Blue Sky! Have fun!

[xinyuehui]

I couldn't put on a finger on why the whole tiktok migration to xhs left a sour taste in me until I got annoyed at recent subtle sinophobic comments towards Love and Deepspace left in the tags. (It's a Chinese game that has a global/English server)

Which had me thinking and seeking out if other people felt the same way. The Americans found a new platform, the Chinese on the platform are welcoming and attempts to speak to the Americans in English. Cool, what is left? The third group of people out here that aren't Americans or Chinese in China, it's us Chinese diaspora that live outside of China (in particular the west). We learnt English, forced to erase everything Chinese about ourselves to fit in here fit in there but never fully get accepted into any community. Online spaces are no better, we get all sorts of hate even though we are all communicating in English. One comment that I read on tumblr here a while back that really struck me was op posted something regrading Chinese culture and some white person dismissed op for having a Chinese url so they must not speak English to speak on a Chinese topic.

Americans barging themselves into other people's spaces seemingly with no effort is the most white privilege behaviour ever. Some of them don't bother learning the language, the culture, or social etiquettes. To call it 'refugees' in this current climate is lowkey insensitive even as a joke. Some are just outright racist saying they are there to colonise the app. The offhanded uninformed political jokes are also on thin ice. If this was reversed and a massive group of Chinese people suddenly joins instagram/twitter/tumblr, starts posting in Chinese, the comment sections will not be as 'haha funny' and 'wholesome' as the ones on xhs.

White people posting selfies on the app is harvesting thousands of likes and compliments is the prime example of white privilege, they don't have to work hard to get far, boosting their egos further more. How am I supposed to feel even when I share something on here of my culture either get no recognition or sinophobic comments?

There's a sense of helplessness when I see my people pandering to the white, similar to when Chinese diaspora/Chinese in China on the discussion of cultural appropriation. The experiences the two groups have are vastly different. I don't blame them for this. China, for the most part, is still a very closed society, a handful of them probably never left the country, interacted with a white person or had any prejudice against them for being Chinese. To them, it's just an amusing conversation or two without much thought. At the end of the day when the Americans leave the app, it'll be another fever dream. But for us, we still have to go to work with these privileged white people, come home from work to what I thought was a Chinese safe space to find that insufferable co-worker is on xhs going 'hello China [google translate some nonsense]'.

That said, I suppose for me who is able to post this on tumblr is a somewhat privilege move. For the people in China, it is an avenue to interact with Americans on a large scale without having to use a vpn. The welcoming atmosphere gives me peace knowing that to be respectful is still in our core. For the Americans, whether they are on the app out of spite without thinking of the consequences or to learn about China with an open mind, only time will tell if they will remain on xhs after the fad dies out.

[ms-demeanor]

I’ve been using browser password managers for a while now. How are these different from something like bitwarden besides not being open source and having the master password be the one tied to your [Google][Firefox][Apple] account? (I assume they’re insecure but I swear my infosec professor said the browser based ones were better. However he also said that’s because they were local to your device and I know that’s not true)

One problem with browser-based password managers is that you may not have access to your browser. If you're at your university library and using their computer to print from your google account, what do you do if they have chrome but not firefox? If your phone breaks while you're on a trip with friends do you install a browser on a friend's phone and log into your account to check funds in your bank account? What happens if you use firefox at home and on all your personal devices but work gives you a chromebook? Do you migrate all your passwords? Do you just never do anything personal on the work chromebook? Do you share some passwords between the two?

Another problem with browser-based password managers is that people's behavior when logging in to their browser is not the same as their behavior when logging in to, say, a social media site.

People don't always lock their screens. People put very sensitive information into their browser password manager and then walk away from their desk. People don't log out of their browser when someone else sits down to use their computer. My attitude is that if you are going to use a browser-based password manager, you should ONLY be logged-in to your browser when saving or accessing a password, because otherwise it means that your password manager is always on and always accessible.

I've got bitwarden set up to time out after fifteen minutes. The password manager I use for work kicks me out every hour. I set my phone screen to lock at two minutes and my desktop to lock after five minutes.

The idea that people are just walking around logged in to their phone browser and never locking the screen makes me crazy. The idea that people might be logging in to their browser on shared devices makes me crazy. But it describes how a lot of people use their browser-based password managers.

One thing that I *love* about Bitwarden is where I can choose to use it. If I want to keep it totally isolated and offline, I can. If I want to access it through a browser plugin or an app on my phone, I can. If I want to go to a webpage in any browser and log into my vault to get passwords, I can. It's extremely portable in a way that browser-based password managers (and honestly some paid app-based password managers) aren't.

Also yeah they aren't local to your device, they store the passwords with your account information. There are device local password managers but I personally do not tend to recommend them because I think that they don't really meet the needs of most users. Sometimes you have to log into your bank account when you're not at home and using a password manager that is only on one computer and nowhere else is going to make that impossible.

(there are use cases for device-linked password managers, and they aren't insecure, but if you set someone up with a password manager that they can only use on one device and then they can't use their passwords when they're out and about, they will not use the password manager - user behavior is a really important part of infosec that sometimes gets overlooked in favor of what is "THE MOST SECURE" - the most secure password manager is the one that someone will USE, so if all you can get someone to use is the browser password manager then that's a good password manager, however if I'm giving my recommendations for what I think is the most secure and works best for the greatest number of people, it's Bitwarden all the way baby!)

[juliathesuccubus]

Artists UNITE!!

So... With all these changes going on, I got a few things to say.

The new "Block" feature. I put quotes on that because with the new changes made, it is essentially useless. As it says, any accounts blocked will still be able to view your content, but won't be able to engage with them, such as leaving a comment or retweeting or anything. BUT if you truly want to protect your posts and limit who can see what, you can lock your account. But that means you won't be able to get more engagement or new followers.

This also means that NSFW artists/content creators who've blocked minors from seeing their content? Yeah, those minors are gonna have full access anyways and there us nothing we can do about it except maybe report them.

Any abusers/stalkers who like to keep tabs on your accounts? They can see, regardless of being blocked.

This has got to be a violation and Google Play and Apple App Store should put X on blast for it.

The second thing!!

If any of you have seen the tweet going around, there has been a recent change to the Terms of Service and will be effective come November 15th.

It'll let Twitter use your posts (images, videos, audio) to train their Grok AI. You can opt out, but come Novwmber 15th, you just automatically get opted back in.

I dunno about y'all, BUT I DO NOT CONSENT TO HAVING MY STUFF USED FOR AI PURPOSES!!

And if you feel the same, I have a suggestion:

I think that we, as artists and content creators, should unite together and nuke our Twitter/X accounts. I know it's a lot, especially those who have really put a lot of work into it, but would you really want to have all that hard work just be fed to an AI?

I say any and all content we have on Twitter should immediately be migrated over to other sites.

Bluesky is always nice and have no complaints so far and since these changes Twitter/X made, they've gain a huuuuuge amount of traffic.

Cora is another place I've been hearing about. I have no opinions about it so far, but did make an account. I've heard they're very anti-AI, so that's good!

Pillowfort could still be a go-to possibly. Hell, maybe even here on Tumblr since it's been getting active again!

We've got options! We can give one last fuck you to Elongated Muskrat to show what we think about his new changes! But that choice is ultimately up to you.

If you guys wanna follow me, my BlueSky account is here, but fair warning, I do post NSFW art on there.

[sincerely-sofie]

Hi! This may come across as a dumb question, but I wanted to write my own PMD:EoS fic, but I’m kind of lost on how I want to organize my thoughts and the plot. Additionally, I get new ideas and then I end up struggling with what I want to do. How did you organize things for your story?

This isn't a dumb question at all! It's something I've struggled with for a long time as a writer, and I'd be happy to share what I've come up with to solve my fight with story organization! I’ll try to speak coherently, but this is something I’m really passionate about, so I might ramble a bit, haha. Keep in mind that this is what works for me, and what will work for you may be very different. Take from this post what serves you well and ditch the rest :> 

Organizational Tools

You can use pretty much anything to organize your story— I’ve used everything from loose printer paper in storage clipboards to expansive Google Docs that are hundreds of pages long in the past. But what I’ve found that really works for me is an app called Notion. You may have heard of it— it’s really popular with productivity enthusiasts and small business owners, but it works like a dream for organizing creative projects! There’s a bit of a learning curve, but you can find a lot of templates out there for free that work really well if you don’t want to set things up yourself.

This is how my Notion page for TPiaG was set up:

The “Cheat Sheets” dropdown list was full of character sheets, links to Bulbapedia articles I’d refer to while outlining or writing, and also my completed outline. “Fun Stuff” was full of memes and jokes about the characters, an empty page that I’d start filling once I received kind comments on my fic, as well as ideas for additional stories relating to the AU— stuff like oneshots and possible sequels or diverging AUs. Fun fact: this is where I first wrote down my idea for The Present is a Gift: Paradox Edition AU!

“Chapters to Write” and “Chapters I’ve Written” were dropdown lists where I divided my outline into little sub-dropdown lists in “Chapters to Write”, and everytime I wrote a chapter, I would move it over to “Chapters I’ve Written”. Nothing is as reassuring when you’re stuck in the middle of writing a nearly 60k word fanfic as seeing the chapters slowly migrate to the right.

Organizing the Story

Outlining is a big part of my organization process, so I’ll be talking a fair bit about it. The first part of any story is your premise / core idea (it sounds like you’ve already got some of your own, so I won’t discuss coming up with those). The next step is brainstorming what you want to revolve around that premise. I already knew the characters fairly well, so what I did for TPiaG is write out a bunch of ideas for scenes on scraps of notebook paper and start arranging them on a table in different ways. I eventually settled on an order of events (many of which ended up cut for clarity in the actual fic), and then I started structuring them into chapters. 

How I structure chapters is inspired by the Kishotenketsu structure that is used fairly often in Asian storytelling. I divide each chapter into 5 parts: an Introduction that provides a starting point for the chapter, Development that builds on and adds context or tension to the introduction, a Twist that causes a new perspective on either the situation, characters, or something else in the story, a Resolution that helps wrap things up in a satisfying way, and then a Hook that leads the reader to want to read the next chapter. This is a structuring method that works way better for me than the Three Acts or the Hero’s Journey— I prefer the stronger focus on character vs. plot— and so I try to use it as often as possible. Here’s an example from my outline (if you’ve read TPiaG, you may notice some differences between it and the actual published chapters of the fic! It’s chapter 4 instead of chapter 3, for one thing!)

Organizing Characters

I’ll be honest— I didn’t fill out character sheets like I should have for this project. I kind of just went with the flow as I wrote them. Twig and Grovyle are the only characters who got sheets at all, and Grovyle still only got a half of one. However, I do have a blank copy of a character sheet I can share as reference!

I think most of this is pretty self-explanatory— but if anyone wants clarification on anything or what goes into the individual note sections, let me know! This is what the topmost part of Twig’s character sheet bio looks like: 

The Torment of the Human Mind, or: How to Deal with Idea Overload

This is an ongoing struggle for me. I’ve mentioned having ADHD in the past, but it really turns idea generation and shiny object syndrome into a purgatory of unspeakable proportions. Before TPiaG, I had never finished a creative project because I would constantly ping-pong back and forth between newer and funner ideas, inevitably abandoning WIPs, come back to them for a few weeks at a time, and then dart off to the next thing. This feels awful because you never finish anything when you’re stuck in this cycle, and having all those ideas as open tabs in your brain is exhausting. 

My greatest advice for figuring out what you want to do and then doing it? Figure out a fun idea— maybe not the funnest idea, but an idea you enjoy and can create with your current skills and a good helping of hard work— and then commit to it with a story priority hierarchy. Every time you want to work on another idea, you have to work on the idea you committed to first for 30 minutes (or a different block of time, whatever works for you!). After that allotted time is up, you’re free to work on whatever other projects you like— but you have to start at the top of the priority hierarchy. That way, you still get work done on your #1 project, but you’re not restricted to it. 

Alternatively: Write until that priority project is done. You can make notes on ideas, you can make Pinterest boards for them, and you can make playlists— but you can only write for your priority project. I’d recommend doing this with a deadline in mind. Something like Camp NaNoWriMo or a similar month-long challenge. Novelty is an important part of my workflow! I get it. But for some people, bouncing back and forth between ideas is detrimental to their ability to focus / write, and committing to a single project at a time is extremely beneficial. I thought that I was someone who needed total freedom to work on any of my projects, but it turns out that being handcuffed to a project and a word count goal for a month was exactly what I needed to finish my first ever complete manuscript.

Yikes, this was a lot. I hope I answered your question well enough. If not, ask again and give me another shot! I love talking about creativity, and I would be overjoyed to help you create however I can.

[lackadaisicalnereid]

Been doing some thinking lately about degoogling as much as I can. I'll definitely get rid of gmail - or leave it in use for one or two reasons - as an online English teacher I need sth for online meetings and Meet is currently what I use for twoish of my students, BUT, I successfully abandoned Google Keep yesterday. I manually went through all my notes and copied the ones I actually need into my new app of choice (we'll get to that in a second), which allowed me the pleasure of getting an overview of what kind of notes I've made in the last three+ years.

recipes

shopping lists

no context numbers (literally no idea what 90% of these are)

fic ideas

journaling

some original writing ideas

things to watch/play/read/listen to, most notably 'the people's republic of walmart' at least twice in two notes made years apart

too long whatsapp messages that i first typed up in keep

dnd character stats and backgrounds and gear

All of this is to say I've migrated to Standard Notes. It has basically everything I need: it syncs notes across devices and it's available on Android and there's a web app I use on Windows, just like Keep. Unlike Keep though, they are also privacy focused: notes are end-to-end encrypted, and the parent company, Proton, who bought them this year, is also privacy focused and resolutely not about taking our data. Highly recommend. My next step is definitely migrating to Proton's email service.

If anyone has any suggestions for this journey, feel free to share them <3

[agapi-kalyptei]

Hey! As we're all being weirded out how bad and incorrect this year's Spotify Wrapped is, here's a reminder that the best time to switch away from them to Deezer or similar is today!

Here are some pros of Deezer:

you can migrate your playlists and favorites and 99.8% of songs will be there too, I assure you

Deezer did not pay $250M to Joe Rogan this year

Deezer did not pay 1.14 billion to Spotify executives this year

Deezer pays artists about 2x more per stream than Spotify

Deezer offers lossless quality

not a buggy p.o.s. like spotify app that changes design every 15 seconds

Deezer offers REAL shuffle! Songs will play randomly and it will not algorithmically play just the most popular songs like Spotify does

Disadvantages of Deezer:

no playlist folders

yeah that's pretty much it. give or take some minor UI differences it's all the same

Also a reminder: A good way to support artists you love is to send them money! Today is Bandcamp Friday, which means 100% of the amount you pay on Bandcamp today goes directly to the artists. (You buy an album and listen to it from their app (streamed or downloaded) or you can just download mp3/wav/flac from anywhere, without any awful DRM.) On other days, Bandcamp takes only 15% of amount paid for digital downloads, which is only half as much as most stores (Steam, Google Play, etc).

There are no perfect, morally flawless, selfless companies, but you can sure as hell do better than give money to Spotify.

[thatsleepymermaid]

Hey listen!

You really really want to participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count this year. I promise it's fun and like a live action pokemon.

All you have to do is download the Merlin app here

Or log onto eBird here

https://ebird.org/home

And start counting birds! The Merlin app has this cool feature where it can identify bird songs!!

The Great Backyard Bird Count 2024 is February 16-19! This data will help scientists directly by keeping a log on migrations and biodiversity!

[mariacallous]

Dozens of neo-Nazis are fleeing Telegram and moving to a relatively unknown secret chat app that has received funding from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

In a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue published on Friday morning, researchers found that in the wake of the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov and charges against leaders of the so-called Terrorgram Collective, dozens of extremist groups have moved to the app SimpleX Chat in recent weeks over fears that Telegram’s privacy policies expose them to being arrested. The Terrorgram Collective is a neo-Nazi propaganda network that calls for acolytes to target government officials, attack power stations, and murder people of color.

While ISD stopped short of naming SimpleX in its report, the researchers point out that the app promotes itself as “having a different burner email or phone for each contact, and no hassle to manage them.” This is exactly how SimpleX refers to itself on its website.

Last month, one accelerationist group linked to the now defunct neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, with more than 13,000 subscribers on Telegram, began migrating to SimpleX. Administrators of the channel advised subscribers that “while it's not as smooth as Telegram, it appears to be miles ahead with regard to privacy and security.”

The group now has 1,000 members on SimpleX and, according to ISD, is “part of a wider network built by neo-Nazi accelerationists that consists of nearly 30 channels and group chats,” which includes other well-known accelerationist groups like the Base. Accelerationists seek to speed up the downfall of Western society by triggering a race war in order to rebuild civilization based on their own white Christian values.

The network of groups on SimpleX are also sharing extremist content, including al-Qaeda training manuals, Hamas rocket development guides, neo-Nazi accelerationist handbooks, and militant anarchist literature. And in their newly secure channels on SimpleX, the members of the groups have immediately made direct calls for violence.

“During a 24-hour period on September 25, analysts observed three instances of users calling for the assassination of Vice President Kamala Harris, and one instance calling for the assassination of former President Donald Trump,” the ISD researchers wrote. “Similarly, numerous users called for a race war that would hasten the fall of society, allow them to take the US by force, and institute their desired system of white supremacy.”

SimpleX Chat is an app that was founded by UK-based developer Evgeny Poberezkin. It was initially launched in 2021, and a blog post in August announced that it had passed 100,000 downloads on Google’s Play store. The same blog post announced that Dorsey had led a $1.3 million investment round, having previously praised the app on other social media platforms. Dorsey did not reply to a request for comment.

Poberezkin told WIRED that he was unaware of the migration of neo-Nazi groups to his platform, but says he believes that despite his network’s focus on privacy, SimpleX can curb the spread of terrorist or abusive material on its app.

“Even in these early days we already did more to prevent distribution of [child sexual abuse material] via the preset servers included in the app than many other platforms did, even though they have much more control,” Poberezkin says. “While we cannot indiscriminately scan all content, and it would have been a human rights violation to do so, if the group entry point is publicly promoted and can be joined, and it uses the servers that we operate, we can remove these entry points and the files from the servers. A very important quality of the SimpleX network is that users cannot be approached unless they want to be. It protects the users from any hostile actors and unwanted promotions.”

In February of this year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that forcing encrypted messaging apps to provide a backdoor to law enforcement was illegal, a decision that undermined the EU’s plan to force encrypted messaging apps to scan all user content for identifiers of child sexual abuse material.

For years, neo-Nazi groups have flourished on Telegram, many of them under the assumption that Telegram was a fully encrypted platform that provided a greater level of security than it really did. Telegram was used by these groups for building out their networks, sharing propaganda, and planning attacks. However, two of the leaders of the Terrorgram Collective were arrested and charged last month, which was a key factor in triggering the migration to SimpleX, the ISD analysts wrote. The group used Telegram to encourage acts of terrorism in the US and overseas.

“For terrorists and violent extremists looking to avoid detection, SimpleX Chat provides significant advantages over Telegram, largely due to its design and features that prioritize privacy and anonymity,” Marc-André Argentino, a senior research fellow at the Accelerationism Research Consortium, wrote last month in an analysis also discussing the migration of extremists from Telegram to the new platform. “SimpleX offers end-to-end encryption by default for all messages, whereas Telegram only encrypts conversations in its ‘secret chats.’”

Poberezkin says that SimpleX is “100 percent private by design” and that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t access information about user IP addresses. Another key privacy aspect of the app is that, unlike most other encrypted chat apps, SimpleX does not require users to enter a phone number or email to register for an account—removing one of the key ways that law enforcement can track down users on other platforms.

“SimpleX, at its core, is designed to be truly distributed with no central server. This allows for enormous scalability at low cost, and also makes it virtually impossible to snoop on the network graph,” Poberezkin wrote in a company blog post published in 2022.

SimpleX’s policies expressly prohibit “sending illegal communications” and outline how SimpleX will remove such content if it is discovered. Much of the content that these terrorist groups have shared on Telegram—and are already resharing on SimpleX—has been deemed illegal in the UK, Canada, and Europe.

Argentino wrote in his analysis that discussion about moving from Telegram to platforms with better security measures began in June, with discussion of SimpleX as an option taking place in July among a number of extremist groups. Though it wasn’t until September, and the Terrorgram arrests, that the decision was made to migrate to SimpleX, the groups are already establishing themselves on the new platform.

“The groups that have migrated are already populating the platform with legacy material such as Terrorgram manuals and are actively recruiting propagandists, hackers, and graphic designers, among other desired personnel,” the ISD researchers wrote.

However, there are some downsides to the additional security provided by SimpleX, such as the fact that it is not as easy for these groups to network and therefore grow, and disseminating propaganda faces similar restrictions.

“While there is newfound enthusiasm over the migration, it remains unclear if the platform will become a central organizing hub,” ISD researchers wrote.

And Poberezkin believes that the current limitations of his technology will mean these groups will eventually abandon SimpleX.

“SimpleX is a communication network rather than a service or a platform where users can host their own servers, like in OpenWeb, so we were not aware that extremists have been using it,” says Poberezkin. “We never designed groups to be usable for more than 50 users and we’ve been really surprised to see them growing to the current sizes despite limited usability and performance. We do not think it is technically possible to create a social network of a meaningful size in the SimpleX network.”

[libraryleopard]

i regret to announce that the second fanfiction about jenny and the cat king bitching at each other has migrated from my notes app to my google docs, which means business

[nighty-amy]

Chapter 633 is up!

First thing first: I moved the main website from managed Wordpress to self-hosted one. The former got me super annoyed with how 85% features are locked behind pretty expensive plans and the app kept nagging me for a subscription update.

With some help from an SEO mentor, I found a hosting where hosting+domain for a year cost less than a monthly Wordpress Creator subscription!

New link:

And like I didn't have enough trouble with the migration, my main OCR completely refused to work today. And Google OCR unfortunately isn't a good tool to use for a whole chapter, it doesn't always keep the sentences order. So I had to first put the sentences in order and then translate 😣

So doing the chapter took me a bit longer than usual. But it's up :)

If you like my Ling Qi translations, you can toss a coin to your translator and buy me a Kofi! But I accept praises and head pats as well (…though looking at how I’m currently unemployed, Kofi is probably better!

[jvno777]

Looking back on my journey, I wish I didn’t find shifting and manifestation through tiktok 2020…

It was like a blessing and a curse at the same time. I was given life changing information, but some of it was misinformation and I was just getting confused and stuck.

Then I migrated to amino—also bad idea, although I really liked how I could just organize my scripts on there and I might use it again for scripting but otherwise I hated that platform. Reddit is all over the place imo.

My feed here on tumblr has been pretty consistent and it’s nice seeing peoples experiences in regards to shifting and manifestation and it really opened my eyes. I wonder if there are really good scripting apps that are organized because otherwise I’ve been using Google docs and I have four separate Google documents for the same script. lol

[atjsgf]

idrc about the tiktok thing but it is wild that tiktok refugees migrated to some random other chinese app where they have to use google translate instead of just....youtube shorts? how is youtube fumbling the bag this hard. this is like when skype somehow became obsolete during covid.

[go-learn-esperanto]

So, I've been wanting to switch over to Firefox but I haven't because I'm just straight up kinda lazy, but with all this talk of KOSA and with Firefox apparently being one of the KOSA-safe browsers, (I have no way of confirming this, just what I've heard) I wanna switch over just to be safe.

The thing is, how much new stuff to I have to download in order to replace Chrome with Firefox? Ik it's not owned by Google, and I've got stuff like Google-owned apps like Maps on my phone so do I have to make a thousand different changes in order to effectively switch to Firefox? Or just download Firefox, make the switch and I'm good?

Hello!

Well, Firefox is just a browser. What that means is that if you want you can still use the Google apps on your phone. They aren't connected to chrome so if you remove chrome they won't stop working. You can also, if you really want, delete those apps but sign in on the browser, in your case Firefox, and you'll be able to use your Gmail and Google Maps but on your browser instead of having a specific app for that. You decide what's most convenient to you. I personally still use those apps, but if want to be extra secure and don't want to have Google tracking too much stuff about you you can choose to only use the browser.

Firefox will, by the way, give you the option to migrate all of your passwords from Chrome to Firefox. This means you have way less work. You just need to download Firefox, tell it to migrate your passwords from your Chrome (it means you have login with your Google account if I remember correctly), and it will do that for you, meaning you don't have to go and put your passwords to whatever site you use one by one. It's honestly really easy to migrate.

What do you have to understand: a browser is just an app that allows you to use various search tools. You can still use the Google search on Firefox if you want! I usually have DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine but sometimes I switch to Google (the search engine not the company) because I want to have a specific kind of search that DuckDuckGo isn't really managing to do. DuckDuckGo by the way is the search engine that tracks you less. That's why it's usually preferable if you want to not have all your search history being shared with third parties.

These are the standard search engines but you can add more if you want. You can use Yahoo or Wikipedia for example.

What Firefox allows you to do that chrome, on the mobile app, doesn't is to have add-ons, more commonly known as browser extensions. The normal Firefox app doesn't have many add-ons available but it has at least some and the ones that are available are very useful.

They're great for adding extra security protection, or just to have a better experience using the browser.

These are all 17 mobile compatible add-ons. Highly recommended UBlock Origin, Clear URLs and Privacy Badger.

You can technically have more but that will make it so you need to use the Firefox Nightly app instead of the standard Firefox. Firefox Nightly is a developer app and you need a lot of extra hoops if you wanna have extra Add-ons on your phone. To me it's worth it because it means I can have XKit Rewritten, Tumblr's saviour at this point, on my phone which almost makes me want to delete the Tumblr app. However you want to keep things simple so just Firefox will do just fine. No need to complicate things.

In conclusion:

Migrating is easy because you can migrate passwords from a browser to the other, you can still use your Google services on Firefox, add-ons are cool.

[magz]

Feel like, with how stubborn ublock origin n community been shown be,

And how as much as there posts on certain circles social media for switch to Firefox-

Google Chrome still huge, many people use it - including older people n children n people that not know much about tech n people that tied to Google because of job / not allowed download new apps like firefox on those computer - those that not understand / aware / cannot migrate so easy / rely on stuff on chrome that not on Firefox (including important accessibility features, or rely on important websites that not work on non-chrome engines - even if you never seen those, they exist).

So, there gonna still be people fight against Google and *try* find workarounds, because over 90% browser market no joke. Unrealistic for each n everyone them switch Firefox, just because our circles do.

Like, for sure, if can - do switch to Firefox for self.

But just because Manifest v3 roll out, am doubt that the people that spent months of volunteer to update uBlock Origin scripts to block Youtube anti-adblocker when it was update almost every other day, would be community that would all give up n not try gut google chrome or find loop + vulnerability to exploit.

Because hundreds thousands people gonna rely on that.

(Also, ignoring the reasons some people unable switch to Firefox or that there gonna be people that still google chrome, n being mean + arrogant about it, not really help the cause. This not competition about being smarter n better on issue of other people's digital privacy.)