Never torrent without 1)a VPN, one that 2)gives you a dedicated IP.

A VPN is great for most things, but not quite enough for torrenting.

This is because (everyone please correct me if wrong) torrenting is peer-to-peer which means that someone seeding to you can see your real isp-issued IP address. They can contact your ISP and whine about you.

If some copyright guardian sets up a honeypot, they could get your identity even if you use a VPN.

The solution is to use a VPN that gives out a substitute IP address they own (and therefore keep private) which then redirects traffic to you.

There may be better ones out there but I haven’t bothered looking ever since I signed up with privateinternetaccess and use their “Dedicated IP” setting.

Who?

1337x has started requiring you to sign up with your email address before you can download. Not today, FBI

“That’s the way of the world” is usually said by Ayn Rand types who don’t care about anyone else or know how to make things better.

Also, they paint the questioner as some nutter obsessed with finding every single byte about a topic.

And, no one is “stuck” on anything, we notice a defect and want to find a solution.

So think about this. Suppose you’re making a community for, say, Ukrainians who have taken refuge in the USA.

What kind of person shrugs off their need to find each other and says “Suck it up buttercup”. Or makes fun of them for asking.

Yes, there are inconvenient and irritating ways of handling the problem. Shrugging it off just tells me what kind of person you are, but it doesn’t improve anything.

Now, what we could do - crazy, I know, hear me out - is think of a way to conglomerate all the content from diverse instances with different policies into one community where anyone can hear everyone else.

Two kinds of people in this world. The ones who start asking mocking questions, and those who put their heads together.

Which leads to polluted water, a blighted environment, and corporations finding ways to rule humanity. No thanks.

Find the hosts file on your machine. Add a line for the domain you want to block, like so:

lemmy.annoyingassholes.com 0.0.0.0

If that didn’t make sense, google the terms I used and you’ll find tons of tutorials.

Oh, I saw the futility of talking to them lonnnnnnnnng ago. You might as well try to convince a christian that they’re wrong. You know why that is? Because they’re both cults.

In addition, there are different levels of socialism. “Some” individual ownership turns people off. “The State owns the house I worked so hard to pay off?” You can have full private ownership of your things AND have single-payer health care, top-tier public education, reining in predatory banks, etc. We want to be Norway, not Venezuela.

I would suggest an FAQ for newbies, since so many are flooding in (like me). Too big a burden for a few sysadmins or mods, so I would suggest you crowd-source it. If Lemmy has wiki-like capabilities, you could use those. Or as a last resort, you could use the actual en.wikipedia.org. This is my first day here, and I’ve read tons but I feel as though I’m lost and without a map.