Helix because it's simple and works without tweaking it.
Not at all, I don't eat eggs regularly
Considering how he runs a business whose goal is to capture the privacy crowd and how a large portion of the privacy crowd is made up of those "Libertarian" tech-bro types, it might be more than just "no clue about American politics", especially since he's also doing stuff like promoting Bitcoin through Proton Wallet which is also popular among "Libertarian" tech-bro types, and the article used for marketing that both-sidesed the problems the "left" vs "right" experience and equated the Democrats with the "left", which is popular among "Libertarian" tech-bro types as well. The 88 in his Reddit username is also suspect regardless of him claiming that it's there because it's his birth year. People who know how to operate a business usually aren't doing it out of stupidity, so I'm not going to give him the benefit of the doubt on this, especially since the entire platform depends on trusting that they aren't doing anything shady.
no they're just negative people
If your really feeling paranoid go ahead and use TOR browser to login to lemmy. Assuming they dont block TOR connections here I’ve never tried.
.w*rld blocks Tor a lot of times, .ml hexbear lemmygrad.ml do not
Well in Idaho, just about everyone I know who lives there supports Israel. And in Texas there are a bunch of people criticizing Kamala and our state's Democratic candidate for Senator for being radically pro-Hamas.
As much as I hate GitHub, for in-person projects involving multiple people I usually end up having no choice since they usually think GitHub is the most important programming tool ever and nothing I do is going to convince them to create an account on something that's not GitHub.
For personal stuff I use Forgejo and disable everything except the code view, so I have a quick way to show people stuff I'm doing (for career reasons).
If I was doing a project with multiple people and actually got to chose the platform I would probably use Forgejo or Codeberg and make use of the project management features.
Pijul looks interesting but the ecosystem is very lacking and it doesn't integrate well with Guix which I base a lot of my workflows around, so until this improves switching to pijul creates more problems than it fixes. The only other VCS and frontend I'm familiar with is GitLab which I don't use anymore self-hosted since Forgejo is more performant and the main version randomly deleted all my repos and changed all sorts of stuff.
cgit also looks interesting, I might look into it.
So now we're going to have AI training other AIs
Why the fuck does their VPN have telemetry?
To answer your question, I joined Lemmy when it was a niche open source project then left because nothing was happening until the mass migration happened
The most important part is balancing your own safety with limited time and resources. Perfection is not achievable, getting as close as you can is not practical in most cases, and prioritizing safety a lot of times limits what you're able to do. So you need to do a cost/benefit analysis on these sort of solutions and decide whether they're worth doing, which is very contextual (and in the end, you're going to need to trust something somewhere unless you reinvent everything on your own).
For instance, in the US if you're a middle class cishet white male citizen who ignores politics, you're biggest problem is probably ads, companies knowing your financial info, and tools being more locked down, so the reasonable response would be to use an ad blocker and switch to open source/self-hosted software when it's convenient, but not to the point where you have to program all sorts of things yourself unless you really enjoy that. If you're working class, time and finances is more limited so the extent to which self-hosting, paid services, and CLI tooling becomes impractical might be sooner. If you're a minority, there's not really much that can be done that doesn't severely affect quality of life (like living in the middle of the woods with no technology if you know you're being hunted by the government, which sounds fucking terrible but probably better than being sent to a concentration camp in a remote country). If you're an activist or an immigrant or doing something illegal, compartmentalizing data that would probably get you in trouble onto devices (that you can afford) with a strong security setup that doesn't touch anything else you own and doesn't cross borders while verifying that the people you communicate with are also on a similar setup and doing other "paranoid" security/privacy measures (while being careful not to draw suspicions) is probably a good idea. If you're trying to be private for the sake of advocating for privacy, then do what you want to do.