Is this like when they made the kilogram some function of the speed of light instead of the weight of a metal ball in a French museum?

Federated actions are never truly private, including votes. While it's inevitable that some people will abuse the vote viewing function to harass people who downvoted them, public votes are useful to identify bot swarms manipulating discussions.

It's Estonian (.ee is the country code for Estonia) but it's also a cool domain hack and the owner opened it to everyone.

That's why I suggested Revanced with "disable recommendations" patches. It's still Youtube and there is no new platform to learn.

I think it's sad how so many of the comments are sharing strategies about how to game the Youtube algorithm, instead of suggesting ways to avoid interacting with the algorithm at all, and learning to curate content on your own.

The algorithm doesn't actually care that it's promoting right-wing or crazy conspiracy content, it promotes whatever that keeps people's eyeballs on Youtube. The fact is that this will always be the most enraging content. Using "not interested" and "block this channel" buttons doesn't make the algorithm stop trying to advertise this content, you're teaching it to improve its strategy to manipulate you!

The long-term strategy is to get people away from engagement algorithms. Introduce OP's mother to a patched Youtube client that blocks ads and algorithmic feeds (Revanced has this). "Youtube with no ads!" is an easy way to convince non-technical people. Help her subscribe to safe channels and monitor what she watches.

Lemmy: Oldest federated link aggregator, better documentation compared to Kbin, easy to self-deploy, less resource consumption, provides the most similar experience to Reddit

Kbin: Poorer documentation, no API access yet, harder to self-deploy, terminology and UI differences from Reddit can turn people off (I really don't like "magazine" for a community)

Tildes: Centralized, invite-only and elitist. Not comparable to Lemmy and Kbin

"Suddenly"? This has been happening for a long time. If you click on outbound links from built-in Windows apps, they used to always open in Edge unless you used a tool named EdgeDeflector to redirect them to your preferred browser. In 2021, they killed EdgeDeflector by making it impossible to redirect links with the microsoft-edge:// protocol baked in, even if you go deep into the registry settings to change this. They will eventually do this to Outlook and Teams too and get away with it, just like they got away with restricting EdgeDeflector.

Adding on to what everyone else has said, the "Users per month" counter counts only the users on your home instance (the instance you created your account on) who have posted or commented in the subreddit this month. The total number of active users across all instances can be seen when you view the community from its home instance.

Yes, it started from this terminology change at Twitter in 2020. They're the reason that version control systems call the primary branch 'main' instead of 'master' by default, because 'master' comes from the master/slave terminology that is used in electronics hardware design.

There's a comment here saying that master/slave in hardware design is being replaced by primary/secondary because of the software trend, which I think is stupid. Master/slave works much better in that context because the master device controls the slave device. Primary/secondary implies that the slave device is a fallback of the master device.

You get tracked if you give up and accept the privacy invasions because "the internet is just like that". Get a phone with an unlocked bootloader, remove the stock Android and install GrapheneOS/LineageOS/CalyxOS.

Reddit has been that way for a long time, after it lost the reputation of "niche forum for tech-obsessed weirdos" and became the internet's general hub for discussion. The default subreddits are severely astroturfed by marketing and political campaigning groups, and Reddit turns a blind eye to it as long as it's a paid partnership. There was one obvious case where bots in /r/politics accidentally targeted an AutoModerator thread instead of a candidate's promotion thread and filled it with praise for that candidate.

Definitely consider self-hosting for file sharing, because public file sharing sites without restrictive file size and auto-delete limits get abused and shut down constantly. 0x0.st (mentioned in another comment in this thread) used to host files indefinitely but switched to a temporary system because of abuse, so anyone who used it as their file host will now have a mass of broken links. Unfortunately, none of the self-hostable file sharing options with thumbnail previews that I'm aware of support image albums which was the most useful feature of Imgur.