A few unwritten rules I've found useful over the last couple of years since moving to Lemmy :)

1. If you're missing a particular smaller or niche community - be the change and create it!
2. If someone is challenging you in a thread in good faith, respond in the same way
3. If they're just being a dick, don't waste any sort of mental energy on them - just block them, forget them and move on.
4. If you're the one being a dick (and be honest, we all know when we are) walk away for a bit
5. Don't be too proud to ask for guidance but do it in the right communities :) e.g. don;t ask for tech help in a community thats not about tech help.
6. Be prepared to see a lot of Star Trek memes and Nicole spam.
7. Bask in the warm glow of an open source, privacy respecting, non-corporately controlled environment.

What assurances do you have they won’t go full proton in the future?

Absolutely none. That applies to all services that exist now or in the future. The only way around that is self-hosting but that path has its own issues including a very steep learning curve if you want to be secure as well as private. Maybe this could be a longer term project to work towards?

For services:

• Mail - Mailbox.org seems the best option right now
• Calendar - don't know.
• Drive - either Cryptomator used with literally any service or a dedicated service like Filen
• VPN - Mullvad
• Password Manager - Bitwarden
• Documents - I just use LibreOffice offline or CryptPad occasionally if I'm collabing with someone.

In truth none of these are perfect. Privacy has got a lot harder recently as Proton and StartMail/StartPage have politically shit the bed and the UK seems determined to kill encryption which means I have to avoid really good services like IceDrive just because they're in the UK.

EDIT: Calendars. Mailbox.org's included one works fine. You can sync using CalDAV. The process for Thunderbird (desktop) is here.

The process for mobile is a little more complicated. First you need Davx5 to actually get the data, but thats all that app does. It's not a Calendar app. It does work with the native Android Calendar but I used FossifyCalendar.

So install both of those then login to your Mailbox account in a browser and create a Calendar (or use an existing one). Get its unique URL by looking under the heading 'My Calendars', clicking the three bars icon, click 'Properties' and you can then copy your CalDAV URL.

On your Android device open Davx5, tap the plus icon then specify 'login with URL and username' tap 'continue' then paste in the URL you copied earlier, your email address and your email account password, tap 'login' and that should work.

Now, switch to your Calendar app. I used Fossify Calendar so if you are too, open that up, go to Settings, scroll down to the CALDAV section and turn on CalDAV sync. It might switch to your new Mailbox calendar now, but if it doesn't, tap 'Manage synced calendars' and activate it there.

I'm a Satanist and affiliated with neither CoS or TST. The leadership of TST are not good people. One of them tried to make himself the god of a cargo cult and the other has a history of making racist, antisemitic and ablist statements. He also owned a website about eugenics until 2018.

That video I linked to is long but it is very well sourced and I hope might give you a bit more insight into who you're supporting if you choose to join or donate to them. There's a lot of comments under the video from ex-TST members, including Ministers and Chapter Heads who've been badly burnt by TST.

Do ISP's monitor or sell or pass on your data? Yes.

Do VPN's? Depends on the VPN. Find one that doesn't and can back that up with 3rd party audits and legal encounters.

So can a good VPN protect your privacy? No, not by themselves. A VPN is part of an overall toolkit to be as private as you personally would like to be. It can help protect your privacy, that's all.

It's really that simple.

Whilst I completely understand why you, as private individuals with limited income and not a huge org that has high priced legal teams on call, have made this decision (I think people forget that it costs money just to defend yourself in court, irrespective of how accurate or legal the charges might be), this is about the 3rd or 4th time that the Admin team have communicated and taken action very, very poorly.

It's really not a difficult thing to do. A post such as this either before or immediately after taking such important actions. I realise you're all busy people with real life stuff to do too but surely you tell new Admin's when they're onboarded that momentous decisions that affect a lot of people must be communicated to the members immediately?

You've already got for-profit prisons in the US where inmates (slaves) are hired out.

What do we know about how a for-profit system works? That's right - profit must always keep growing, or to put it another way, incentivising the process of creating criminals in order to increase the potential for a growing slave labour market is a growth industry.

Just because something doesn't have the literal name 'slavery' attached to it, doesn't mean it isn't actually slavery in every respect that matters.

If she's a good therapist she'll be feeling awful she couldn't make it. I'd wait to hear her out before making any judgement on either her no-show or her as a therapist/person. It's highly unlikely to be a personal slight, whatever it is, and if it's not personal then there's no need to develop a thick skin.

Gonna take friendly umbrage with you putting Shyamalan on that list but not mentioning John Carpenter or Wes Craven :)

I try to ease up on the c word when I think I might be replying to an American because I'm aware it has pretty hideous connotations over there.

Ask them when you can install the bug on their phoneline, open their mail and remove their bathroom door.

Going by rate of blog posts by year they don't seem any noisier than usual. The opposite if anything. 18 this year and there's only 3 and a bit months left of the year whereas in 2018 they made 60.

People have accused .world of trying to be the 'new' Reddit but to me it was clear from day one that it was beehaw that wanted to do this. By 'new' Reddit, I mean a walled garden environment. Once they do this it won't be long before they introduce ads etc to the software they choose. Y'know, to 'supprt the site' etc.

I totally understand the desire for a safer space but I genuinely don't believe that that is the beehaw admin teams primary desire. Or if it is, they see it as a marketable USP, not a thing they necessarily believe in. I think from the start they saw the potential for making money and this is just another step on that long process.