The most I've heard of was that time Mozilla tried experimenting with ostensibly privacy-respecting ads. Generally I get the impression most everyone on the fediverse hates ads - I do too, am also a uBlock user.

But this is something I wonder about every time I look at federated systems and what options operators have for keeping up with costs. Options are pretty slim, and for most cases donations are unlikely to be enough. I get that advertising is dirty, and about as capitalist as it gets, but at the same time, I feel like the lack of a fediFOSS alternative to the big ad systems like Google is a missed opportunity to essentially strike at the heart of surveillance capitalism.

I do not have the technical skills to even begin to make such a thing reality. But I do have a vivid imagination, and had some ideas starting with the question: what if an ad/pr system were designed specifically to not manipulate the end users, but rather put them in full control and potentially be something that they might even want to engage with?

Ignoring the technical details, I'll try to describe from the site operator and end user perspectives.

Say you're running a blog or something, and you want to monetize. The ad system has banner ads available, either small text ones or full on images - though maybe the ad market server operator has rules to prevent ads from getting too intrusive. Instead of opaque, manipulative algorithms, the ad marketplace allows anyone serving ads to freely create categories on the fly based on a tag system. Maybe limit the amount of tags used by increasing costs for the number of tags used.

So the blogger chooses which tags they feel are most appropriate for their site, and the banner serves a rotation of ads placed in those tags. There could also be a system for specific advertisers and site operators to work out their own sponsorship deals.

Now a user visits the blog. They see a random assortment of ads on the pages they visit. Something hits different because these ads are not suspiciously related to that conversation they were having with their friend 5 minutes ago. Also they keep seeing a lot of stuff they obviously have no interest in. But on the bottom of every ad they see upvote and downvote arrows, and it says something:

Don't like what you're seeing? Click Here to choose what you see. Or, Click Here to block ads.

If they choose the second link, all ads from that ad server marketplace will disappear from every site for that user. Although a feature like that would probably have to rely on cookies, so it would only last as long as they keep the cookies for it. So maybe what that link could do is additionally give the option to generate a block list for use in adblockers, and point to where the user can install a supported adblocker.

On the other hand, if they choose the first link, it takes them to the marketplace server where they can sign up for an account. Signing up gives the user a full suite of features. They can fully curate which ads, ad tags, and advertisers they see, which ones they can block, and all of this exists on a feed system where these can all be rated and reviewed.

Because it would be a system that's meant to put the user in full control, it doesn't have to stop at ads. It could double as having Liberapay integration and learn about content creators they can choose to support, and even include systems where users could choose to see banners with news of local events they could join. For every site with ads from that marketplace server, the end user would be able to choose to have every banner display only the ads they curate, the ads chosen by the site operator, or a mix of both. This would mean there should be a way for the site operator to see anonymized metrics of which ads and tags are being most viewed on their site, and be able to still earn revenue from user-chosen ads.

Ideally all of this should work toward a system where the most liked products, content, events, and services rise to the top and become the most seen, and bad ones fail miserably - while still allowing anything more niche to thrive as well. All together it could be something that blurs the line between being an ad system, and being a more general purpose passive discovery engine, and crucially, one that any user can switch off at any time.

(And it should go without saying, that unlike existing systems, it should be designed from the beginning to respect and protect user privacy on all levels).

Anyway, those are just some of my ideas. Opinions? Other ideas?

Not that it matters much, ultimately it's about becoming familiar with where stuff is put, even if it's in a weird grab bag of /usr, /var, /etc/etc/etc. Still, I can't help but check out Gobolinux from time to time.

From the video description:

We're swimming in conflicting nutrition advice, so why not go straight to the definitive source?

I sit down with Dr. Walter Willett, Professor of Nutrition at Harvard, and the most cited nutrition scientist in the world. With a half century of research & data from hundreds of thousands of participants in the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, Dr. Willett has done more to define what a healthy diet actually looks like than almost anyone else in history.

We cut through the noise of internet fad diets to discuss what the highest-quality, long-term data actually proves about longevity, chronic disease, and what we should put on our plates.

We cover:

Carbohydrate Confusion: The crucial difference between whole grains and potatoes (and his new 2025 substitution study).

Protein Sources: How beef is the most pro aging food.

The Truth About Fats: Reflecting on the landmark 1993 trans-fat paper that changed the food industry (and the massive pushback he received).

If you want rigorous, peer-reviewed science rather than the latest social media trend, this is an interview you cannot miss.

Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this video with anyone who needs a dose of real nutrition science!

BOOKS:

Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating by Walter Willett https://a.co/d/0agTI4Zh

Nutritional Epidemiology, 3rd Edition by Walter Willett https://a.co/d/0bgJUThX

Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet by Johan Rockström https://a.co/d/062OhrdW

PAPERS & REPORTS:

EAT-Lancet 2025: Global food transformation needed to ease pressure on the planet and save millions of lives https://www.stockholmresilience.org/r...

Meat vs EAT-Lancet: The dynamics of an industry-orchestrated online backlash https://changingmarkets.org/report/me...

Optimal dietary patterns for healthy aging | Nature Medicine https://www.nature.com/articles/s4159...

Intake of trans fatty acids and risk of coronary heart disease among women | The Lancet https://www.thelancet.com/journals/la...

Consumption of Olive Oil and Diet Quality and Risk of Dementia-Related Death https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama...

Total and specific potato intake and risk of type 2 diabetes: results from three US cohort studies and a substitution meta-analysis of prospective cohorts https://www.bmj.com/content/390/bmj-2...

FASCINATING CHARTS:

Harvard's heat map from optimal diets for healthy aging: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l7Fe...

Harvard's type of fat vs. mortality: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dWla...

EAT Lancet's food guide graphic: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ngOg...

• 0:00 Our journey to obesity
• 3:21 The leading indicator of population health
• 7:59 Why we believe in some sciences but not others
• 11:48 The campaign against EAT Lancet
• 22:12 Beginning of Dr. Willett interview - Diet
• 29:31 The best science doesn't get published
• 30:46 Getting the ban on trans fats
• 37:47 Is nutritional epidemiology reliable?
• 42:02 Eat Lancet diet & seed oils
• 47:33 Environmental aspect of food
• 50:34 Dr. Willett's critics
• 1:00:16 My conclusions##

Pic relevant. I've tried playing the new Civ games several times, and quickly end up quitting because I find them too overwhelming and find it hard to want to deal with the learning curve.

It occurred to me that part of the problem might be that I was jumping into a very old franchise that has been getting increasingly complicated over the years. Had a hunch I would have better luck with the original, so I went onto one of those play-dos-in-your-browser sites, dove in, and sure enough I am hooked!

Do I know what I'm doing? Not really, but stuff is happening and my civilization is growing, and it's a good time.

For context, in my password manager I had tried formatting some of my entrees so that it would contain the usual username and password, but instead of creating whole new entrees for the security questions for the same account, I just added additional fields in the same entree in order to keep things a little more tidy.

I was not expecting that doing so would result in later being shaken down by Proton to pay even more money just to access the same few bytes of fucking text I had trusted them with. This is sleazy as fuck and I am dropping these idiots entirely.

Personally, when I order something these days, it's been on eBay. It kind of sucks though, and half of the packages still arrive in Amazon boxes anyway...?

Where do you liked to order stuff from, that's not Amazon?

Does lemmy have any communities dedicated to archiving/hoarding data?

I've always felt like the whole docker/jellyfin/plex/loads-of-other-apps stuff is way too overboard just to do a bit of pirating, so I usually just hop on one of the movie/show or anime streaming sites with uBlock Origin installed and watch that way.

Currently I'm looking at what I can setup in the living room, and was thinking of just using an old PC with a wireless keyboard. I would like to use a media center type interface, but I've never actually used Kodi before. Would I be able to just use Kodi to stream from those kinds of services?

Searches so far show that everyone apparently uses Kodi with something called Real Debrid, which I have zero interest in.

That's probably my biggest complaint with the looter shooter genre - they're all made with ps3-gen and later design sensibilities. When I play games like Quake, I want those to have rpg mechanics, loot, and an open-ish world structure like Borderlands.

And when I play Borderlands I wish it didn't have the iron sights (semi optional as they are), and combat mechanics that promote cover-style shooting. My character feels like a snail. I want to bunny hop around these open environments in fast chaotic skirmishes.

Anybody else feel similarly?

Not a tech support question, I'm just curious. I recently installed it. Everything is working great, feels like I got a whole new laptop compared to my previous setup. I haven't tried out any of btrfs's unique features, so I dunno, nothing special I can report about it. Coming from Debian I was just surprized by how different Fedoras installer defaults are. Do you agree with btrfs being a default option?

I keep thinking about this.

1. Most retro handhelds do not have cellular network chips, gps, or even built it microphones or cameras in many cases. But many do still support wifi and Bluetooth.

2. The vast majority of them do support either Linux, Android, or both. This is the area that needs the most work, since the Linux distros on these devices are so stripped down that they can't do much more than run emulators and a few bespoke game engine compilations. And for the Android-supporting devices, there would be a need to build more privacy-respecting roms. But that's the thing - many of these devices openly support that, it's just not something the communities have gotten around to creating.

3. While this would become less useful with popularity, this kind of approach would be a form of steganography. If you're in an extreme situation where you or your belongings are being searched, how many people are going to suspect that the little Retroid Pocket gaming handheld is even something you can or might be storing your private info on?

Edit: Judging by the comments so far, I underestimated how unknown these devices must be still. While they do technically include handhelds like the PSP/Vita, 3/DS, etc; these days when people use the term "retro handheld" they're usually referring to a veritable cornucopia of gaming devices that come in a wide variety of hardware configurations and form factors. They are most often ARM-based devices, though there are even a couple that are pocketable fpga devices. Some of them are even small enough to be keychains.

Right now some of the most popular companies in this category include Retroid, Anbernic, Ayn, and Ayaneo. There is also a large selection of 3rd party custom firmwares out for many of these devices. But again, most of these are just very stripped down versions of Linux. Instead of full fledged desktop environments, they normally have media center style frontends like Emulation Station. And as far as I know, none of them have bothered to port any of the conventional Linux package managers.

As far as I understand, there is no technical reason why PostmarketOS, Mobian, or LineageOS for MicroG couldn't be ported to at least some of these devices, as some examples.

Hopefully that is enough resources for anyone to start to get up to speed. It should be apparent that full, unbroken system experiences with up-to-date software is possible on at least some of these devices, even including apps like Signal.

Opting out of ATT seems like the most obvious no-brainer, but are there options for phone service that are actually halfway decent?

Or as an alternative, would it be feasible to get some kind of internet phone/texting service, use that over wifi, or maybe have a basic data plan to go with it at most?