God, how do normal people even browse the internet anymore?

@alice my brother's work Windows laptop doesn't have a VPN / browser extensions and it's basically unusable

Thankfully we (UK) are not about to force age verification on every VPN user.... /s 🤬

@miss_rodent they do among my circles, but then again I don't think my circles count as particularly "normal" to begin with.

And I like it that way.

@Aprazeth gosh he's hot...

@alice since my employer disabled things like ad-blockers, I would have to see all those ads. That is, if I wasn't the nerd I am. Since I am, I spend 5-10 minutes on each page disabling every single element and div that annoys me.

@alice By having not-quite-normal friends/relatives install uBO for them

@alice glowing orange circuit breaker vibes

ash in your hair because of What You Are Invoking so you pull up the hood on your plastic mac and go "Ah that's better, right let's get back to it" vibes

@alice Fair, I've kinda made a point to nudge everyone around me into using them for the last... decade or more... so, it's become normalized in my proximity too, though I'm not sure how common they are more broadly.

@alice It's insane. All the protections on my network are now filtering out around 47% of the traffic.

@alice

... Yeah, I mean I wouldn't snog him but I wouldn't mind being gently snuggled to sleep either

@schrotthaufen I use AdNauseam. Blocks the ads and silently clicks them so it costs them marketing budget. I gleefully waste hundreds of dollars of ad spend each day.