Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

    • imp_poe@awful.systems
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      18 hours ago

      fucking hell. well i guess moving all my shit elsewhere has become my midweek project instead of my procrastinate-project.
      EDIT: [rereads and comprehends the tuta addendum] well. cool. i think i’m going to reschedule that “move everything” to after my “scream and cry into a pillow”. anyone have any other recs?

      • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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        16 hours ago

        I am also in the “scream and cry” phase of this. However, I have already decided on the following replacements for non-email:

        1. Mullvad VPN
        2. Ente for photos and photo backup
          2a. their authenticator also slaps
        3. Filen for cloud storage[1]
        4. Bitwarden for password management
          4a. Keyguard is great if you are on Android. I am looking into[2] other (non CLI) Bitwarden-compatible password managers for Desktop

        edit: Should mention that I am also looking into a calendar replacement.

        edit2: maybe mailbox.org? They are recommended on PrivacyGuides.org.


        1: This is more like a stopgap for me until I confirm they are worth sticking with or find someone better. The 29.99€ 100GB lifetime storage may be worthwhile for this (though I cannot say whether I am confident they will be around in 5 years, this can at least serve as a short-term solution).
        2: lassitude

          • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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            4 hours ago

            Thanks! I actually plan on putting a couple of things on Mataroa:

            1. “Here is a list of shit you can do to make your computer suck less (would contain the above)”
            2. “Here is how to make your Pixel phone less frustrating in 2024 (basically, how to use user profiles to create a dumb phone without the massive security issues or headache of ‘oh, actually I do need that app occasionally’)”


            (Aside: if anyone can recommend a better blogging platform, I would appreciate it. I like Mataroa for its privacy focus, minimalism, and low cost-of-leaving. The only issue I have is lack of KaTeX/MathML/however-the-fuck-omg-why-is-TeX-still-trying-to-hurt-me-in-2025 support.)

            • self@awful.systems
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              4 hours ago

              Aside: if anyone can recommend a better blogging platform, I would appreciate it.

              so I can’t promise better, but you’re eligible for an account on the awful.systems blogging platform if you want one. it has MathML! it has jank! you can modify the frontend by PRing into a repo!

              it hasn’t seen much use yet, but I was planning on posting a short story I’m writing there when it’s done. I can also say that as much as I don’t like WriteFreely on the web, its phone app is surprisingly ok

        • Mii@awful.systems
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          12 hours ago

          Filen does photos too, so you could consolidate 2 and 3 into one. I went and bought 500 GB lifetime storage on their Black Friday offer. Let’s see if they stick around. So far the experience has been smooth.

          And if you mention mailbox.org, let me throw Posteo.com into the mix. Basically the same offer, but where mailbox presents itself a bit more business-like, Posteo seems to market itself towards individuals. I moved my mails there and are quite happy with it, but you have to roll encryption yourself. No auto solutions like Proton or Tuta.

          • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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            8 hours ago

            Last time this came up, I considered Posteo but decided to hold off (I think it was actually you who suggested it ❤). There was a concern I had about deleting an account due to inactivity, but I think I just misunderstood or misremembered something on PrivacyGuides. This might be a good choice.

            As far as Filen for photos, I am reasonably confident that Ente will stick around (they seem to take sustainability seriously). Stuff like this worries me about Filen (emphasis mine):

            What else is planned for Black Friday this year?
            As every year, we’ve planned a special surprise to give back to our loyal users this Black Friday. Just like in previous years, we won’t be revealing any details just yet. All I can suggest is to check in with us around November 18th—you won’t want to miss it!

            Are lifetime plans stackable?
            Yes, we’d like to emphasize once again that all types of our plans can be easily combined. Subscription plans only expire based on their individual purchase dates.

    • self@awful.systems
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      21 hours ago

      proton’s ceo is, at this moment, trying to post through it on multiple official company accounts

      thank fuck I switched to tuta

      [I hold up a hand to my earpiece and make a horrified face]

      a second milkshake has hit the duck (cw: fetishized racism, you know the one)

      I’m waiting to hear back from tuta about what the fuck but this might be the reason why I hop providers again

      image description (but see cw)

      so somebody at tuta had the idea to write this post on their official account on Twitter:

      Don’t get cucked by Big Tech’s invasive policies. Keep your private data safe and secure with state of the art end-to-end encryption with Tutanota.

      and then the image attached to the post is a cuckold porn meme I started to describe here but won’t??? because describing the image put me in a really terrible mood??? it’s SFW but trust me you don’t want it. the Black men in the picture have had their faces covered by logos for Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook in that order. the white woman in the picture does not have her face covered. impact font bottom text: “YOUR PERSONAL DATA”

      • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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        7 hours ago

        Here is their response:

        @mav Yes, this was bad. I did not take a screenshot back then (the post was deleted after 30 minutes), but I scrolled all my way through Mastodon to find our apology:

        https://mastodon.social/@Tutanota/108910936764865962

        https://mastodon.social/@Tutanota/108910937813834878

        This was a mistake, we apologized & we made sure that we would never post something similar again.

        At Tuta, we foster honesty, respect & diversity.

        We are here to fight for privacy & against Big Tech surveillance. We want everyone to get the respect they deserve.

        and this:

        @shalf We set up guidelines that all team members on social media duty need to adhere to. We also created a social media review group where we post & discuss every proposal before actually publishing. And it has worked fine ever since. :)

        Content of Apology

        Dear Privacy Fans,

        Last week, on Friday, a post was made on our social media profiles which goes against our core values as team members and as a company. This post was made in poor judgement, without stopping and examining the underlying racist and sexist problems posed by this meme template, and it does not represent the culture and environment of the Tutanota Team. After a period of approximately 30 minutes the offensive post was removed from all platforms and a “brief” apology was posted.

        This brief apology does not go far enough to address this mistake and we would like to update everyone on how we are working to address this issue internally and how we will make sure that this does not happen again. As a company we are working with all of our team members to foster a culture that respects diversity in all forms. This is both on a personal level between colleagues, but also at an institutional level by working to create structures which allow diversity to flourish.

        • self@awful.systems
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          3 hours ago

          I mean… it’s an apology, I don’t know what I was expecting. this still feels like a bigger, redder flag than the one cop who called them a honeypot (and at the same time didn’t seem to know what tuta is) — is this really a service I feel safe recommending marginalized people use? probably not, they should use signal. is it even suitable for the “grandma & drug dealer” use case? that question’s a bit more difficult.

          could they really have said or done anything to fix this? shit, I don’t know. maybe I need to dig a lot more into who and what tuta actually is. I ran into one of their (former?) developers on mastodon and they seem to outwardly be marginalized and antifascist. if that’s what tuta’s composed of internally, then I’m a lot more able to trust them. until I do that checking though, I don’t think I’ll recommend tuta to anyone who might need it — the opsec risk of trusting your keypair to a company run by assholes is very high, especially in the current climate.

          • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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            2 hours ago

            I agree. Currently I can’t recommend any email providers. Hopefully Posteo works out, but at this point I am strongly considering just starting my own competitor in the vein of Signal messenger. Basically “we think of email as a public good.”

            • self@awful.systems
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              2 hours ago

              I’d love to work on something like that. have you checked out any of soatok’s work on federated key infrastructure? I can dig up some links if you haven’t and it seems interesting; I understand soatok is developing it with the possibility that it could be an enabling technology for federated end-to-end encrypted email in mind.

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
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        20 hours ago

        Shit’s so diseased its a sequel to Tuskegee. They cooked this cack with CIA-grade crack.

        (I have no rational way to respond to this - I’m just trying some Dracula Flow-type shit and hoping it lands.)