And a Pi Hole for good measure.

White list firewall. Because this is the real reason everyone has a right to ad block. Ads are hidden links to other websites. It’s like walking through a gauntlet of pick pockets bribing the credit card company just to make it to the checkout at your local grocery store, or some asshole you invite into your home that goes to the bathroom, opens a window, and lets a dozen random people in your home if they pay a dollar for the access. The entire system is based on stalking people. It is criminal.

Librewolf

What does Arkenfox do? I’ll definitely add it if it’s beneficial.

What about Privacy Badger? Is uBlock better?

The only reason I haven’t switched to Firefox from Chrome fully is because for some reason Firefox for Android still doesn’t have tabs for large screen devices. Mozilla says it’s not a priority. 🤷

I used Brave for a few years but recently switched to LibreFox. I really enjoyed Brave as a browser but couldn’t handle all the sketchy shit that seems to keep coming up

Same. I had no idea about brave and I started using it full time on all my devices like a month ago. Guess I’m going back to Firefox. Which was fine.

I think those existed on Reddit too. It’s just that you could never actually confirm they existed.

I downvoted because it was a lazy comment not providing further elaboration. If anything, the fact that such a comment is highly upvoted shows that this community is not mature yet.

That I’m not engaging in online discussion doesn’t automatically mean this is a bot or “dedicated reducing” account. Please restrain yourself from judging strangers on the internet.

Might as well take shits with the door unlocked; same level of exposing yourself.

In a way yes. You’re giving Google (via an increased browser market share) the power to decide the direction of the web. Their interests as a corporate organization are not aligned with yours, so they will make decisions to your detriment if they have to.

Just use Firefox. Mozilla isn’t good but it’s not evil

I don’t know how people browse the web on mobile with ads taking half of the screen.

It’s not really bad per se, it’s the default on most Android devices these days. The problem is that almost all modern browsers are Chromium-based which give Google a lot of power to implement changes (see manifest v3 & web DRM). Personally, I’m trying to slowly reduce my usage of Google products. I’m using Firefox on desktop and a mix of DDG+Fennec on my phone.

Orion

Thanks for the tip! Do you know any similar solution like this for iOS? I’m struggling to find a fully featured browser with decent ad-blocking capacity.

Oh believe me I get it. But at the same time the CEO didn’t rename brave browser “anti woke browser” and force it to not load “woke sites man”.

Shits all open source right? Even if I disagree with him politically that’s on him. I can use my money to donate to my political designation and even fork the brave browser if I don’t want to support it.

Elon and Spez were one way no choice fuck you CEOs. We didn’t get much choice there. And they use their platforms to remind you of that. I don’t really feel like brave does that at all.

Edit: I’m also going to add that I don’t use brave. I also don’t care much about politics outside of leave me alone, leave my neighbor alone, and make things affordable.

That’s why life is hard for grownups. You have to decide what you think is important and not.

With your way of seeing things it looks like no one should be criticised since no one is without sin?

Underrated comment - the top is filled with toxic scum. True regardless of what side of the political spectrum you fall on.

I don’t personally resonate with the idea of “boycotting” things, mostly for the fact that these companies will never miss the $20 I would have spent on them. “Boycot” to me, implies some sort of noticeable statement.

For me, when Im thinking about getting a Chik-Fil-A or something, the question is simple: “Do I want to give my money to these people?”

Calling something Ubiquitous isn’t arguing any point. It’s just a statement of observance. It’s not a call to action. It’s not a reason to do one thing or another. If anything, it’s a symptom. A pattern. And patterns can be a reason to change. Happens in psychology all the time. In fact looking for the patterns is in part in identifying a problem. So congrats on identifying something everyone else already knew. But you certainly can’t argue that a pattern as enough of a reason to not change a pattern.

And then they cry because of brigading. I will tell you something. I got brigaded multiple times from FIREFOX USERS.

Lies. Your CEO is killing Firefox. They are working with Meta and Google.

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser

No. That is factually wrong. Brave is open source. This is more like if we discovered the creator of mastodon was donating any profits he managed to make to some bigotry party. You wouldn’t see me barking down the nice people who host mastodon or contribute to its code.

Separate the patrons, artists and art. Because it is not the same and that logic cuts all sorts of ways.

I’m not sure if you mean to say people like me arguing to separate patrons, artists and the art - especially where this is open source - or people like the writer of the article in the OP.

So I’ll speak to it from both ends: people naturally want to vote with their time and money. If money is seeing ads and generating crypto for someone they don’t support; fine. I think everyone understands where they’re coming from. On the other hand I can google github + project-name for brave and find all the code and fork it…if you don’t like something about brave just fork it or use a stripped down fork.

I don’t use brave to begin with but the public executions are fucking obnoxious when the product hasn’t taken a unilateral shift in direction. Twitter and Reddit were proprietary platform you were locked in for if you used them daily. There was never an alternative way to use those products in their full functionality; both had to be 100% recreated on mastodon/lemmy. If you don’t like Brave’s CEO you can literally fork the project, remove the shit you don’t like and use the work for free.

Mullvad is a fork of firefox so it’s okay to use

Mullvad is trusted. They are pretty open with their policies, exist for a long time already, not involved in any privacy scandals (to my best knowledge), charge flat and fair fee without 60% sales and other dubious marketing practices. It is one of the better VPN providers, not in 5/9 eyes (they are in 14 eyes though), you can buy a subscription with crypto, which (assuming crypto was acquired anonymously too) is a good start for some privacy guarantees.

Pretty much every cyber security professional I know uses Mullvad in one way or another, usually as part of a more complex solution.

But all in all, please bear in mind that VPN is not some magic silver bullet to preserve your privacy and anonymity. With VPNs you basically shift your trust from your ISP to the VPN provider. That trust you put into the provider, it is still a requirement. Not to mention that a good chunk of tracking is happening on a lower level nowadays, so if you use Mullvad on Windows / any Apple device etc. do not expect to become untraceable :)