My first experience with a pc was Windows 3 also! My parents business computers. I remember playing Jazz Jackrabbit and skifree on it. I was very young. I did get to use bare DOS tho from a hand-me-down computer that only booted into DOS. I'm not afraid of a little Console/Terminal work. I actually prefer it for some tasks. Like Arch's pacman is SO fast.

We're the generation that learned to troubleshoot bc we had to. If we wanted to play that shiny new game or app, we had to actually get it running first.

Yeah because some asshole thought he needed the cats more than I did 😮‍💨 and gave up not even half way.

This wouldnt be as much of as issue if Lemmy had better support for connecting with other instances and their communities.

That account still has to be linked to a real person, and not doxing yourself circles back to using social media responsibly. Social media is just that, Social media. You cant swim in the pool and not get wet. The ways in which your describing it being abused are ways in which every facet of every social media can be abused. So if one is so concerned about it, why even bother using social media.

Well yeah I want people to tie my lemmy.world and lemm.ee accounts to each other, which is why i used the same username, that was intentional. But this username can't trace back to any of my personal information.

I get what your saying, but I think this boils down to just using social media responsibly. The downvote/upvote system isnt a privacy exposure point. Even with the timed thing, nobody is upvoting the same thing on 2 accounts at the same exact time. And personally if i vote a post or comment on one account I'm not going to bother voting the same with another account.

Okay so say a bad actor gets this information, and wants to use it maliciously. If they goto the users instance and attack the user in posts and comments, then they likely get banned. All this data links back to arbitrary usernames. I dont understand where the actual "threat" is in this data being semi-public.

They are comparable in the way they are both large archives of information. The thing about reddit is that there was alot of information on obsure topics.

I disagree. So many people used Google and Reddit congruently as a sort of "hack" for finding solutions quickly, not just tech based but for any and everything. Google even announced that their search has worsened since the reddit changes. For it to be noticeable by Google and enough the publicly comment on it, I'd say it was driving alot more traffic to reddit than your thinking. It also brought in non daily active users to the site, potentially turning them into daily active users.

Tldr, if this was hurting Google enough to notice, reddit is definitely feeling the pain. 😁

Not necessarily on that last point. Alot of people run older hardware, especially recently with the economy dialing back and negligible updates being made hardware wise the past 5-6 yrs. Like i DD a '15 i7 MBP with Arch linux, and if it weren't for the Saved documentation in the Arch Wiki for this 8yr old laptop, I would be SoL on getting many things working.

I couldn't happily imagine such a future personally. Thankfully its possible to block instances without having to pay for the privilege.

My old cheap Asus N66u router has a free dyndns service built-in. Super easy to setup. I use it to host a jellyfin setup. Bout to setup a torrent server and a NextCloud server. Used to run a owncloud server a few years back and loved having it.