Privacy

44437 readers

247 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

How do we actually confront or evade "kirkification" and the flood of ai slop? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 days ago by h333d@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

46 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have been thinking a lot about digital sovereignty lately and how quickly the internet is turning into a weird blend of surreal slop and centralized control. It feels like we are losing the ability to tell what is real because of how easy it is for trillionaire tech companies to flood our feeds with whatever they want.

Specifically I am curious about what I call "kirkification" which is the way these tools make it trivial to warp a person's digital identity into a caricature. It starts with a joke or a face swap but it ends with people losing control over how they are perceived online.

If we want to protect ourselves and our local communities from being manipulated by these black box models how do we actually do it?

I want to know if anyone here has tried moving away from the cloud toward sovereign compute. Is hosting our own communication and media solutions actually a viable way to starve these massive models of our data? Can a small town actually manage its own digital utility instead of just being a data farm for big tech?

Also how do we even explain this to normal people who are not extremely online? How can we help neighbors or the elderly recognize when they are being nudged by an algorithm or seeing a digital caricature?

It seems like we should be aiming for a world of a million millionaires rather than just a room full of trillionaires but the technical hurdles like isp throttling and protocol issues make that bridge hard to build.

Has anyone here successfully implemented local first solutions that reduced their reliance on big tech ai? I am looking for ways to foster cognitive immunity and keep our data grounded in meatspace.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The cloud? You mean someone else's computer? 🤣

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

That's actually my recommendation yes.

If somehow after a month you feel like you do want this "lifestyle", are comfortable with setting up a VPN (if you need external access) THEN spend more and get your a SBI like a RPi and have it at home. If that's still not enough then go up to a proper server you host, use a non commercial ISP, etc ... but IMHO don't start with a server at home if you are not familiar with all this, it's counter intuitively harder and definitely more expensive.

Also FWIW you should still have an offsite backup regardless of how you do it.

[–] SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I get where you're coming from (and why) but am of the "rip the bandaid off clean in one go" school of thought.

A smaller start (like using that RPI to self host Jellyfin server for your home) puts you on the road to sovereignty straight away. A Pi 4 costs what....$60 (plus $30 for power supply and SD card)? Hell, use an old laptop.

Once you have one thing running, your on the right path for the next and the next.

Doing it on the cloud I think is paradoxically harder and ultimately self defeating.

Don't get me wrong - if you need the cloud (say, you need to rent a H100 for a few hours to fine tune your LLM), I'm all for it. But if sovereignty is to goal - and the gateway drug is a SBC and a few days / weeks of self learning...you may as well start eating the elephant. IMHO and YMMV of course.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

IMHO the key aspect isn't where you host things but rather understanding how hosting itself works.

To me the most challenging aspects are how to :

route traffic
start a service
backup your data

and also ideally

have more than 1 service on a single machine
restore your data
restore your entire setup

For that very first step I would say having a machine directly exposed to the Internet makes it easier. I don't know what ISP you use but at least in Belgium where I'm currently located all ports are closed and IP are dynamic. That means if you want to show your freshly started Apache Web server to your mother in law it will challenging.

Meanwhile if you do manage to get to the last step, namely restore your entire setup, then restoring to a cloud service or a RPi is the same, you transfer your data, start your services and voila, you are back either LAN only or on the entire Internet via a cloud provider.

So autonomy isn't as much as to where things are physically hosted and by whom as in the actual capacity to able to host there or elsewhere.

Finally if you are using a commercial ISP, as opposed to having your own AS, are you really self-hosting?

[–] SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

For sure. I can dig where you're coming from.

For me, I wanted to replace cloud based services for my personal use / in home as primary motivation; it's only very recently that I am considering things like setting out-of-LAN access for broader family.

(I do have a minimal off site back up (to a raspberry pi stored at my parents home), but obviously this is not enterprise level infra).

My personal quirk is power management. Yes, my rig only uses about 80-100 w...but I can't stop day dreaming creating a fall over system / bespoke UPS. Back of napkin calc suggest that a single marine / car battery should be able to store enough juice to run it (and my router) for 24hrs. Clunky as it is...the DIY nature of that really appeals to me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q4dUt1yK0g