#LemmyWorld is in Cloudflare’s access-restricted walled garden. It’s an asshole instance that not only excludes some people from access but it hoards people who are in the included group, creating a perversely centralized power imbalance that rewards elitists. To non-assholes, Lemmy World communities are parasitic because they rob the fedi of the decentralized balance it needs. To participate in Lemmy World communities is to either be uninformed/out of touch OR to be an informed asshole.

That said, lemmy.ml is not a great place either. At least it’s not excluding people on the basis of IP address, but it’s still disproportionately large and has a history of political baggage by admins who are very trigger-happy with the censor button. You could have chosen a better instance, like Sopuli, but then your sidebar acknowledges the apparent past existence of a Sopuli AITA community.

NTA for giving refuge from a destructive instance. If it were reversed, and you were to create a community on Lemmy World that already exists in the free world, it would be a YTA case. Poaching users from a bad instance is a good semaritan move.

How to fix this

Promote the most digital rights respecting venue in the sidebar, which is !amitheasshole@discuss.tchncs.de. Encourage cross-posts to and from discuss.tchncs.de. Make no mention of Lemmy World and other centralized nodes.

I would not normally post in lemmy.ml but thought this thread was worthy of an exception.

Lotta bullshit in this text. Sure, when they quote Trump, it’s an accurate quote of bullshit from Trump. But then there are some unquoted bits direct from the author that are also bullshit.

Such a currency will give a federal government, our federal government absolute control over your money,”

Yes but only the money that people voluntarily decide to store in CBDCs. The private sector has proven to abuse their power, so a public option gives people the option to choose a different controller – as they choose. As they might like to choose. As someone who boycotts Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx, I could use more options.

CBDCs could potentially lead to a dystopian future, marked by a significant erosion of financial privacy and an unprecedented concentration of power.

^ That’s not Trump talking – that’s reclaimthenet. And the truth is the opposite. Currently there is an unacceptable concentration of power, demonstrated when Paypal, Visa, MC, and AmEx colluded to block donations to Wikileaks. Having a competing alternative to those options further /divides/ the current concentration of power.

Additionally, the shift to a CBDC-dominated system could eliminate the anonymity provided by cash transactions, leading to a society where anonymous spending is impossible.

Nonsense. Citation needed. Having another option on the table does not change the anonymity of cash. The serial numbers on the cash banknotes cannot be tracked by the CBDC as cash changes hands. There is no mechanism to make this claim true.

And currently Visa and Mastercard are actively pushing the #warOnCash. When you use a visa or mastercard, you are feeding adversaries of cash. So having more alternatives gives options to avoiding feeding the war on cash.

Has avoiding Cloudflare become Impossible?

Mostly, yes. But let’s break this down. Cloudflare only breaks web services and so far Cloudflare’s privacy abuses and gate-keeping is mostly confined to the web. Avoiding Cloudflare is impossible in some circumstances.

CFd government sites are unavoidable (voting rights lost in the US)

The only Cloudflare sites that are strictly unavoidable AFAICT are government sites. You can always boycott the private sector, but the public sector is shoved down our throats. There are 6 or so states in the US where voter registration goes through Cloudflare. Even if you register on paper there is still no escape because the data entry worker likely uses the Cloudflare site. I am a non-voter for this reason. Although it’s still possible to move to one of the 44 other states and register there.

CFd medical websites

See How lack of digital rights, Cloudflare, and Google worsened a medical emergency situation and undermined human rights. When you need medical info in a hurry, boycotting is tough.

search is liberated – but only by 1 single search service to date

There is only one general purpose search service that helps avoid Cloudflare: Ombrelo, which tags and down-ranks Cloudflare websites in the results.

The long answer is here.

The short answer: Cloudflare holds the TLS keys and terminates the tunnel. The padlock misleads people because they think that means the tunnel goes all the way to the server hosting the source website.

Note as well that you are using lemmy.zip, a Cloudflared instance. CF sees your IP address, username, password (unhashed) and everything you do. (edit: See this comment for alternatives).

The idea would be to have one omni-directional antenna for both FM and DAB, and a separate directional one for one particular FM station that’s hard to get. Perhaps I should first build the omni-directional antenna – and maybe it will prove good enough to pick up the one weak station. If not, then I would build a directional one.

Thanks for the tip. bummer to hear I have to run separate coax cables or come up with some kind of remote switch.

The CO₂ footprint of streaming is significant. That article is about video, and audio would be much less, but when you listen to the audio all day long it’s significant enough.

There’s also a privacy factor. To stream radio online with the same level of privacy as receiving a radio broadcast requires using Tor, which likely triples the footprint with the 3 encrypted hops.

W.r.t hardware, my DAB player is a multi-function device; not just a tuner but also speakers, bluetooth & USB. It’s the same speakers I would use if playing an internet stream. To improve reception the hardware to add for the antenna is quite simple: aluminum pipe, bolts, and coax… nothing that would generate more e-waste.

Yes that’s true but the reason I listen to broadcast radio in the first place is because I’m on a limited connection. Broadcast radio consumes zero internet bandwidth. It’s also a lower carbon footprint (the transmission energy is spent whether I receive it or not).