I definitely haven’t seen questions like this asked at all, let alone repeatedly, which is probably where part of my patience comes from.

wait, why is everyone so interested in everything I do all of a sudden? Why is every corporation suddenly collecting all my data and giving me free stuff in return while raking in billions of profits? Hm, sus

This never occurred to me. I found articles about privacy and the risks that were out there as a young child, way before I noticed any kind of change in levels of privacy (didn’t notice any change myself). As a kid I wasn’t aware that certain corporations were making billions, I just enjoyed the free ride and then saw all the articles about privacy risks. And nothing bad ever happened to me and I didn’t see articles about bad things happening to people, so I still didn’t care (after all, I was on Android, I could just… deny this app permission to access something, problem solved! At least that is what I thought) until I saw someone get doxxed. I’m 18+ now, but sometimes you have kids online who don’t obviously seem like kids because you can’t see them online, and thEy Arent TypIng l11k3 dis!!! or making constant baysic english lenguige missteaks but use regular English at the same level of fluency as adults. If you transplanted my 10-year old personality into a 10-year old today I could easily see them getting on the Fediverse and passing for an adult for awhile, because my 10-year old self spoke and wrote basically the same way I do now, minus the swear words and life experience.

And also, the fact is most people just don’t care about stuff until it affects them or someone close to them. It sounds nasty and I want to be better than this, but the fact remains we all have a limited amount of care and energy to go around. I mostly try to fix my own issues, not exacerbate anyone or dismiss anyone else’s, and help out where I can.

I’d imagine if you’re not in tech circles you also don’t find out much about privacy risks. I really try to extend the benefit of the doubt to people, give a way they could reasonably not know things, because I know I’m arrogant and want to counteract my own “oh my god how do you not know that you fucking idiot lmao I’m so much better and smarter than you” tendencies. And I truly cannot know what things are actually like outside of my experience, at most I can just read about them and get some idea.

Once I wondered why everyone cared so much about something I didn’t. I wanted to give what seemed like most of the world the benefit of the doubt instead of dismissing their care as invalid and stupid, so I sat and thought about it and came up with a guess.

My guess was way off base. It correctly explained some tertiary aspects of why people cared, but totally missed the primary reasons. And until I had it explained to me, I probably would have continued to miss the primary reasons for my entire life. Sometimes it’s useful to get the answer from the horse’s mouth instead of guessing on your own.

But I definitely understand the bit about people getting upset when the things they care about are invalidated. One of my Things is people just assuming the best of each other or at least not namecalling each other when assuming the best is foolish or impractical, so I reacted to your comment and wondered if I should have because half the time I get a nice exchange like this one we’re having, and half the time I get some condescending, snarky replies. And the condescending replies feel very bad.

I totally get your point about the vegetarian forum and agree with you, but this is c/asklemmy, not c/privacy. I’ve been around the Fediverse long enough to know it’s generally a pro-privacy environment, not everyone else has been.

Again, I’m really not seeing the “I don’t see why anyone else should” part in their question, I suppose we’re interpreting it differently.

As another user said, it’s good to ask these questions. We shouldn’t shame people for asking. I’d rather ask a question and look stupid for needing to ask it once, than be ignorant forever. Could they have just searched “why should I care about privacy” online and gotten tons of answers? Yes. I’d also imagine that not everyone grew up with the norm of exhausting all other avenues of information before you ask other people for help.

As for how they asked the question, I’m just reading it as them saying they don’t care about privacy, not that we’re all idiot twats for caring. I think it’s an honest question, not a disingenuous “why does anyone care, you shouldn’t and you’re all stupid if you do.”

I’m cool with telling people in real life almost anything about me sans my SSN and passwords. I don’t consider any of it personal and have probably too much trust in random strangers.

I still recognize others might not be like me, and don’t shame them for their choice to not share details they consider personal. Even if it’s something like what their favorite food is. A little weird in my opinion, but I’m still not entitled to that information.

I’m also aware of how people can use information against you. I trust you not to go trying to commit identity theft with my birthday and SSN and real name, but a bad actor scraping the web for SSNs totally will. So I have to hide some things. I’m definitely not ashamed I was born on DD-MM-YYYY with the name Firstname Lastname and assigned the SSN 000-00-0000, but I also know people will use this combination of information in order to harm me. Is their intent to hurt me specifically? Probably not, they just want to spend money that is not theirs. Will I get hurt anyways? Yes. And if I’m not careful about it, a lot of other information about me (like my hobbies, the way I type, etc.) can be used to link my online identities together and eventually find one of them that tells you I am Firstname Lastname, and a different online identity that tells you I was born DD-MM-YYYY (I should probably go scrub my birthday off everything). This, even without the SSN, is enough to get you trusted as being me for a lot of things, like when you call into a pharmacy. And I ask the customer service person to pass on my complaint about that about 10% of the times I call into such places where the security should probably be tighter. My SSN might be harder to find because I don’t talk about what it is, but I hear they get bought and sold online pretty often. Some website that did need my SSN gets hacked, and now that’d be ripe for the taking too.

I probably should care about what big companies are doing with my data, but honestly I feel I’ll just be one more person in a group of a million. Companies won’t care.

What I’m scared of is stuff like the example above. A dedicated person trying to connect my online identity to my real-life one.

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Added the games, skipped the communities that are specifically about your mods for games. That feels a lot more self-promotional.

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I think you are right, considering there’s an issue on Codeberg directly referencing my post.

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I can’t actually see the source of the OP of this chain on kbin.

I’m going to be honest, I have no idea why this is happening. I never thought I would be the idiot who would have to have other users reformat their unusable links and I’m upset that I am apparently that idiot and I’m incredibly frustrated by it. I thought !communityName@instanceName and @communityName@instanceName were supposed to work across the Fediverse so I didn’t have to resort to [text I want to display](URL) every time I wanted to share a community, I guess not. I cannot grasp why some of these are not working for people and are sending everyone to a kbin.cafe search link, even if they’re from Lemmy. Especially since when I used @communityName@instanceName on a different post, I was told by a Lemmy user that !communityName@instanceName was instance-agnostic and would let you access the community through your own instance. Not through mine (kbin.cafe). And that I shouldn’t use @communityName@instanceName because it would send everyone straight to that instance, where if it isn’t also your instance you’re probably not logged in so interacting would be inconvenient.

I wanted to make a helpful resource, not something people have to spend time fixing because it doesn’t work and I’m very upset that 1) it had to be fixed for me and 2) I can’t understand how to fix it myself. Apparently @communityName@instanceName should be equivalent to [text I want to display](URL) but given that listening to that Lemmy user didn’t work out for my current links I have no idea if swapping the ! for @ would actually work. Plus even if it did, interacting from your own instance would be inconvenient.

I did use the Lemmy style.

I was told to use !community@instance… so that’s what I’m using here

This is also what constantly pops up in Lemmy sidebars.

You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !communityName@instanceName

Unless you mean that the Lemmy style is just !community, you don’t type @instanceName after it. Did you mean that?

I was under the impression the way I typed the links would work for everyone. I suppose I was taught incorrectly and I’m extremely frustrated by it. I don’t want to be the village idiot trying to help only to require everyone fix their mistakes for them but it seems that’s what I am right now.

I’ve actually been using !game@instance.xyz for this entire post, from the very start. Is it behaving as if I didn’t do that for you?

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Not saying this resentfully, honestly curious. What need does reposting my post as a comment with the instance names that I had in parentheses removed fulfill, what benefit is gained? I put the instance names there for communities that have the same name or close to it, and/or cover the same thing, so that you can tell the various same-name links apart. If it does something useful, I’ll be happy to repost this when no more links are submitted with the instance names taken off. Is this kind of like what some people used to do on Reddit, reposting the post as a comment because otherwise mobile users would be unable to copy/paste the content?

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Different people will be different, I find big gaming news interesting to talk about and don’t want to see games from genres I have no interest in. I definitely see your point about active communities and how a more general community might bringing up stuff that you don’t like enough to follow but do like enough to have a casual conversation about it!