Libredirect is great, but it's usefulness is waning. The frontends for Twitter and Instagram no longer work which hurt the usefulness. The frontend for TikTok is great when it works, which is only about half the time.
Can you provide any examples of ads someone (maybe you?) received directly due to Apple’s policies and behavior? Totally serious question.
If you use an iPhone and have app tracking transparency enabled then any targeted ads you're seeing are almost certainly coming from data that Apple has collected from you.
A few years back Apple made a big change to iOS that prevents user data from being sold to data brokers and ran a big ad campaign about how they are the good "privacy option". But the reason they made the change was not to protect user privacy, but because Apple wanted the money that Facebook was getting from iPhone users. The same data is still being collected and sold, just by Apple now instead of Facebook. That was the crux of Facebook's big lawsuit against Apple accusing them of anti-competitive practices.
But the threat of Apple turning on its customers isn't limited to China. While the company has been unwilling to spy on its users on behalf of the US government, it's proven more than willing to compromise its worldwide users' privacy to pad its own profits. Remember when Apple let its users opt out of Facebook surveillance with one click? At the very same time, Apple was spinning up its own commercial surveillance program, spying on Ios customers, gathering the very same data as Facebook, and for the very same purpose: to target ads. When it came to its own surveillance, Apple completely ignored its customers' explicit refusal to consent to spying, spied on them anyway, and lied about it:
How would blocking yourself from the ability to follow Threads accounts stop them from... anything? It's not two-way if one of the two parties doesn't want it to be, and Meta can't be trusted.
Can you explain how defederating prevents Meta from extending open standards (ActivityPub) with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage Threads competitors?
The greenest/cheapest way is to recycle an old laptop. They're pretty efficient and unless you're transcribing video anything in the past 10 years will be plenty powerful. Also the built-in battery is great in case of a power outage.
Then, just get one of those multi-disk USB HDD enclosure and pop some drives in.
For an OS, I like CasaOS which runs on top of Debain. It is a single-line install, and makes running docker apps very easy, for the services you mentioned and many others it can be set up entirely using the GUI.
For those that are confused, realize Lemmy and Mastodon are two ways of displaying the same ActivityPub information:
Mastodon "favorite" is a Lemmy "upvote"
A Lemmy "comment" is a Mastodon "reply"
A Mastodon post with a mention is a Lemmy post within a community
A Lemmy "community" on Mastodon appears as a Mastodon account that boosts (retweets) everything that tags (is posted within) it.
Viewing a Lemmy community from Mastodon shows the entire community (posts and comments) in chronological order. Yes, it's messy but doable.
Viewing a Lemmy account from Mastodon shows a feed of that user's posts with URLs to the Lemmy instance they were posted to.
If a Mastodon user mentions a community, that toot gets posted to the community. Replies to the toot appear as comments on Lemmy and replies on Mastodon.
As others have noted, a toot exceeding a Lemmy instances character limit (200 I think by default) will be cut off on Lemmy and "overflow" into the "body" of the post.
Things that don't directly "translate" AFAIK are the downvote arrow and the community moderator for both of which Mastodon has no equivalent.
The problem is that I don’t think the mods of the L community are able to ban M accounts from mentioning the L community, or prevent the reboost on the M side.
Just because I haven't seen anyone mention it, the distro that finally allowed me to make the switch was Zorin. It is extremely noob friendly for people coming from windows and the first time (for me) I had a linux that "just worked".
It's astonishing! I get why dril or some celebrity would go with BlueSky, but journalists seem to be trying to make it a thing too! It's like did you learn nothing?
They use "proxigram" which has also never worked for me.