1,672 karma · joined July 24, 2021
Then once you've reached a number you like, just delete all those follow train tweets and start building an audience the right way.
Why do this? You gain credibility having at least 100 followers than having none. It's a sleazy tactic, but it works.
There's two extremes to being online: you can wear your heart on your shirt sleeve and post under your legal name, and share details about your private life, or you can be a ghost and leave no traces, or at least minimize your footprint.
There is this thing: some people are just so famous online, that reverting back to some private mode is nearly impossible for them. They're so out there and involved with so many services, that 'going dark' for them would be very difficult, but there are steps you can take to minimize your footprint. It's not too late to take those initial steps.
I encourage everyone to attempt to 'go dark' gradually and make it very expensive for people to dox you. If you turn it into a game, it's even better. I said it was tedious, but honestly I kind of like becoming a ghost. I'm so opaque to big tech now, that it must really piss them off, including dragnet surveillance.
It's not a life for everyone however, and sometimes I have to participate in big tech like using my smartphone to do online banking, or buying something on Amazon, but 99% of my activities online are all more-or-less anonymous and private now, and I'm happy with that.
I typically save the QR CODE TOTP seed image aswell as a recovery code to be safe. Stuff it in Bitwarden if you must, but do save these crucial items incase you forget your credentials.
Have you ever heard of the `swiss cheese method of security`, where each slice of cheese has a hole in it? The idea being: each slice may have a hole, but when sandwiched together, the route of entry is blocked. I've heard the adage: 'complexity enlarges the attack surface' before, but not in all cases especially. Sometimes security 'maxims' get in the way of security.
It's useful advice, for those who don't want to get burnt out on acid. So many suffer the 'grim meathook reality' as Hunter Thompson wrote. I mean psychedelics do induce spiritual experiences when the set & setting is right, but too many over-indulge and think they're the Messiah / Second Coming after it all, which is dangerous.
Also: the west has no shamanic centers where we can do psychedelics safely, apart from the Native American churches where you can do peyote rituals without getting arrested. Sadly the men in white coats are the closest thing to a shaman you can get in the West, and we sometimes need a sitter/guide especially with high doses, preferably someone who has done it before multiple times, and can calm you down incase you start having very pronounced anxiety.
Or when you write Stylus[0] themes to create custom skins for your favorite sites. Sometimes the Stylus theme doesn't honor what you've coded, and you have to manually over-ride with an !important
They are successful because when the phone rings, they make money. They've turned making money into a pull versus push situation.
So when is security a top priority for you? Do you have separate machines for sensitive things?
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[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...
But if you are going to interact with Tor and setup hidden services, Whonix[0] is your best bet. The idea behind Whonix being that even if there's some javascript-based 0-day that tries to decloak you, it can't leak your naked IP, because it fails closed and everything is routed through Tor.
I'm aware of this, which is why I do full disk encryption of any VPS instance I operate. See the Third Party Doctrine[0] which applies to the US only AFAIK.
If you really want true self hosting you would run it off your own on-prem machine and use your ISP to push & pull content. Putting things on a VPS is not really 'self' hosting as you're entrusting a third party to not get their datacenter burned down, or the hard-drives corrupted, etc
That said, the only caveat to hosting in your own house is it could suffer a fire, and your data is wiped, so having /BOTH/ a VPS and an in-house on-prem solution means you're not putting all your eggs in one basket and you have a contingency plan in place, which one day may be worth it. It buys you peace of mind because of the redundancy.
[0] https://piwigo.org/get-piwigo
[1] https://ente.io/
I often wondered how medieval the world would become if there was a huge sun flare ejection that breached the magnetic field and destroyed a bunch of data-centers. Think of the mess we'd be in!