Zak

Instagram has long maintained a login wall, so I'm not surprised to see one on Threads. That means they hate the open web, not necessarily federation.

I do assume bad faith when it comes to Meta, and I suspect their middling, slow implementation of ActivityPub here is mostly intended to discourage antitrust actions against them.

The headline is a bit misleading. The government had a warrant to search the phone, which required repair before they could do so. The court ruled that repairing the phone was not a separate search requiring a separate warrant.

Federated systems handle free speech very well; you can run your own server and post anything you want there without interference from other server admins. You have 100% freedom of speech with Lemmy.

You do not, however have 100% freedom of reach. If your server is a frequent source of content or behavior other admins find unacceptable, most of them will block it.

I'm surprised so many criminals are picking these niche services that haven't had their security verified by trustworthy third parties. That's just asking for trouble.

There's an inherent tradeoff between pseudonymous reputation and privacy, though usually not a very severe one if you minimize what private information you share.

Reputation is important for healthy online communities. If I post something that seems suspicious based on its content, people can look at my account's history to see if it looks like a real person with varied interests and opinions. I think mine does; someone who looks at it will probably conclude that I am a single person posting in good faith of my own accord rather than a bot, an account run by an organization, or an influencer for hire.

If you don't want to have that kind of history, that's fine, but it does diminish your credibility if you're posting on topics where influence operations are known to be taking place, or where there's an obvious incentive for someone to do so.

I'd rather people be able to trust their local police for protection than want to rely on themselves

Even if the police were trustworthy, they're usually not fast enough to interrupt crimes in progress, especially in rural areas.

Pixel 4a. It has a headphone jack, the bootloader is easy to unlock, and it's well supported by third party developers (I run LineageOS on it).

The stock kernel doesn't support ExFAT, which is annoying. I'd prefer if it was a little smaller.

Rant: every newer phone is worse in terms of bootloader, size, or headphone jack.

This seems like a perfect use case for extensions. You want a UI feature that the developers seem to have decided is too niche to include in the app.

This comment assumes good faith. That is probably a mistake.

Attempts to implement communism at the scale of a nation state have always involved significant concentration of power. It may be impossible to do otherwise.

Power corrupts, and concentrations of power attract the corrupt.

I think the grandparent comment's poorly articulated point is that 911 is for emergencies involving an immediate risk of death. It's better to call the non-emergency number for the local police department to report crimes that have already occurred because the phone system will prioritize the calls differently.

Also get a gun. That’s a no-brainer in this kind of situation.

I'm pretty pro-gun and absolutely in favor of armed self defense. This is not good advice.

We don't know enough about this person's temperament to say whether she would be psychologically able to shoot someone. OP's description suggests she might not. Sometimes people unsuccessfully try to use guns for intimidation and end up disarmed by their assailant. There's also the matter of proficiency; we can't assume she knows how to use a gun safely and effectively. The costs of instruction and practice ammunition add up, on top of the cost of a firearm.

Some people in this situation should get a gun, and it's something I would encourage OP's friend to think about, but it absolutely isn't a no-brainer.