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Find a small fediverse server on the topics. Lots of niche corners to explore

https://fediverse.party/en/portal/servers/


There was a recent HN posting on the US banning Chinese car brands from being connected to the internet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706212

If Chinese companies comply with the ban by providing car models without internet connectivity, it's hilarious to me that that the nationalist regulation could make Chinese branded vehicles more desirable from a security & privacy standpoint.


The current 100% tariff on Chinese EV’s will negate that advantage for American consumers.

In the short term. In the medium term it just means that when they finally do break in they will demolish the incumbent. This is exactly what happened with the US auto industry in the 80. Protecting an industry with tariffs and legislation often makes that industry lazy and slow to innovate and eventually just kills it because they have forgotten how to compete.

Europe doesn't have that high tariffs on them, neither does rest of the world. Chinese manufacturers will continue their global meteoric rise whether they are successful in US or not, its just 4% of population even if wealthy.

And if they actually do provide better cars (more secure and respecting privacy while massively cheaper), who am I to complain.


The activitypub based pixelfed servers are open source and give an Instagram like experience. And there is the advantage that it can federate with outside fediverse feeds too

Europe already implements consistent data privacy regulations for all apps operating in Europe. No particular inconsistency in singling out TikTok over Meta

Thats funny, I took a look at publicly available harms from various social media apps and deleted Meta apps.

¿Por Qué No Los Dos?

Why stop at two? X seems to just be crazy person x says crazy thing y, so no problem adding that to my dns blacklist, fb and insta are as you say, just as obvious as tiktok. SEO results are dominated by AI vomit blogs, nothing to see there so searech engines are useless. LLMs seem to be mostly ok for finding things right now, I'm sure they will figure out how to mess that up soon enough though. YouTube is really useful for figuring out how to fix my <insert thing broken in my house>. But other than that is just the prototype the other stuff was based on. For news I look at news sources that cost money, wsj, economist etc. because then there is at least a chance that I myself am not the product. For finding music I ask local musicians who they like and follow those referrals a few deep. For seeing funny pet antics I look at my pets. To learn more about tech I come here and follow links.

Unlike TikTok, X is an American social media platform. By default, It is protected under free speech rights. TikTok is Chinese and doesn't get to play that card. End of story.

That doesn't keep them off my dns blacklist though. Seems like whatever card tiktok played was good enough to get tomorrow's administration to change course.

If the Democrats field a candidate that is willing to debase themselves with a stupid dance that goes viral, I feel there may be a change of heart. Assuming Trump doesn't manage to run for a third term.

Yup exactly the same thing is happening only with money laundered through nonprofits and political pacs. Once its there the same buy data and place ads & influence is completely legal - which makes the singled out ban on TikTok at odds with the stated purpose of it

It's not the "exact same thing" since it's legal spending. If you and your friends want to pool money together and put up billboards promoting carbon free energy solutions, congrats you've formed a political PAC.

This is distinct from a foreign entity, without registering as a foreign entity, directly participating in electioneering. While it's true that the Russian involvement in 2016 was overblown let's not pretend it's the same as legal political spending.


US funds foreign political no profits in other countries thanks to the Foreign Assistance Act agencies like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.

That's besides the money funneled through other agencies which are more covert.

That means that countries around the world have US funded no profits effectively doing non bi-partizan political activity.

Officially those should only inform (foreign) citizens about their civic and voting rights, in reality they are more often than not tools of the US to influence and take huge biases in other countries.

And here's the underlying problem: as per American exceptionalism it's fine when US does that, but it's unacceptable when others do it in US.


There are multiple organizations not registering as foreign entities who route a lot of political spending. Sometimes they are caught, but there is very little enforcement of political spending rules - and there is even more spending unchecked in the open skirting the transfers legally as far as I can tell.

If it was a legal requirement for Chinese apps in China, and this is the path for societal heath then why not pass that law for all social apps in the US?

Blanket content bans are the stuff of dictatorships, but restricting access to demographics that could be most harmed by it (children for example) is a good idea, and I wish the US would look into it.

Or perhaps you haven't encountered Chinese content because of soft suppression of the content from within the US bubble

I don't buy this narrative, even as a Chinese American.

There are a ton of viral videos on YouTube about people travelling the most beautiful parts of China. Free for everyone to consume.

Chinese movies/shows just kind of suck, especially compared to the quality of Kdramas and anime.


Let's be real, the top talent in China flocks to the tech world – internet, manufacturing, the whole shebang. Entertainment? Not so much. That industry's heavily regulated, you know? Look at what they've achieved: drones, electric vehicles, solar power, robotics... You could even say China basically "outsourced" entertainment to the West and East Asia.

Do you have any concrete examples of Chinese culture elements as popular as anime that is "supressed" in the US?

I am also interested because I would love to explore it.

Tiktok and communism are the first things that come to mind

TikTok wasn't being supressed and Communist doesn't originate from China.

And TikTok doesn't create content, it distributes it.

And TikTok is banned in China.


Suppression can only go so far against really impressive works. Consider how even the Iron Curtain had trouble keeping them out, and today's USA has no such walls, but instead, an impressive cultural industry of its own. (Or was that your point ?)

That's doesn't make sense either - not an android iser or dev but shouldn't there be a system level backup interface. Even if its storing the app-local storage as an opaque blob with a label?

Sounds logical, but it doesn't seem to be the case. The backup options are "Photos/Videos" "phone data" and "both". I don't think phone data includes all app-local data. Contacts, calendar entries, and such, get synced but that isn't due to a global backup process that is the Google apps syncing with your Google account. Other apps could do that with the right integrations, but not all have the option and either have no backup or backup by syncing to their own service or an external option like an S3 compatible store.

It is somewhat disjointed.

When I last changed phones, between phones from the same manufacturer both running recent Android versions, the "copy apps, settings, and data" process didn't include all app data either so I need to take extra steps.

I don't think there will be any big push to address the matter, because for the vat majority of users it isn't a big issue: most of their data is synched to various services anyway and that which isn't wouldn't be particularly missed if lost. There are very few app dealing with important data that are local-only.


I tried switching from iOS to GrapheneOS a while back.

From what I can tell, Google intentionally broke Android’s backup subsystem in order to force people on to their non-E2E encrypted cloud storage.

It makes me sad that, in practice, Android somehow manages to give people less control over their devices than iOS.


Because US social media companies have sold data to foreign adversaries when then used it to attempt to influence domestic matters

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