You can’t change your IP with your own VPN server, you have to go through a third party VPN or proxy

I’ll quit YouTube before I watch ads.

Long time ago, already downloading it

What are you trying to accomplish? Hide/anonymize your Internet/torrenting activity? Or access your LAN devices from the Internet? Because those are two different use cases for VPN. One requires paying a third party provider, the other - hosting a VPN server on your network.

Not cool, bro, it’s against the pirate code to cheat at multiplayer video games.

Microsoft is shoving Teams down everyone’s throats harder than, I don’t know what. Teams is just awful, it’s slow, clunky, and a piece of shit that nobody asked for.

None.

Have a good backup strategy and nuke the OS/restore data from backup when needed.

I wouldn’t trust any antivirus to clean everything properly after my machine has been infected.

Yeah, I’d rather not go down that rabbit hole, it’s too much for what I need. I just want to be able to search for torrents easier and add them with one click, I don’t need the whole automation stack.

How do you install search plugins in qBittorrent? When I follow their instructions, paste the plugin URL to add it, nothing happens. I’m using a headless qBittorrent web gui

I don’t, I can find free ones that meet all my needs.

Don’t insult seawater, it definitely has more value than NFT

Firgirl repacks are a godsend. Just being able to not download the languages you don’t need is amazing, all games should allow that by default. Why should I download extra 50GB of content in languages I won’t use?

No.

Just have backups of your data. If i get infected, I wipe and nuke from orbit anyway, I don’t trust that antivirus will remove everything.

One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure

I agree with your first statement, but not the second one.

I mean that Microsoft and Gmail took over the email protocol and right now if you stand up your own email server with a new domain/IP you basically have zero chance to get your mail delivered anywhere. They’ve positioned themselves as “higher” authority because of the sheer number of users they control and can now control the entire email system.

Same thing could happen with instances if we elevate lemme.world or any other instance to be “more legitimate” so their user votes count higher.

Sorry, I misunderstood. I definitely agree accounts created for the sole purpose of upvoting stuff/bot farms are bad. I just don’t know if there’s an effective way to fight it as they’re getting pretty elaborate these days and it’s hard to distinguish them from real accounts.

Pretty soon we’ll be at the point where no one will trust anything on the Internet.

That defeats the purpose of decentralization and creates a dangerous precedent. The entire point of Lemmy is that every instance is equally valid and legitimate. If certain instances are elevated above others, we’re on our way to do what Gmail and Microsoft did to email.

Why am I being a dick, I was genuinely curious. What do you mean “vote manipulation”? Like making a post with one account and creating another one to upvote the post?

But that’s kinda the point of all posts. You post because you want people to see something and you want your post to be popular so it can be seen by the largest amount of people.