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

@DavidNielsen someone asked "how do you even keep track of all your followers?" and I said I make tiny hair dolls for each one, so I can tell whenever one is out of place.

Then I spent over an hour searching for the perfect photo of a small, real human (or cat) hair effigy.

I was disappointed that I couldn't find just the right image, so I started searching for felting instructions so I could make my own.

Like a perfectly normal person.

I'm now the proud owner of this.

Like a perfectly normal person.

@alice Yup, I've been clearing and cleaning up computers infected via adware and malware delivered by ads for more than two decades. Ad blocker is the first thing that gets added any computer I work on.

@alice Browse the web? I haven't done that in forever. I doomscroll, and I might click a link someone shared here. There's a few RSS feeds I follow. And a couple of pages I bookmarked to go to directly.

There is no browsing.

@alice I'm a teacher, I use adblockers, automatic cookie decliners and similar addons. Sometimes I assign my students online grammar exercises. When I see the same website I always get a shock and try to gently suggest that maybe they should look into getting an adblocker. Similarly, my heart drops everytime they just click "accept all" to get the cookie banner to disappear as quickly as possible.

@alice very... very carefully

@alice I don’t install an ad blocker on my work computer because…internal software reasons…and I *loathe* looking at web pages on it.

I guess it’s a good way to keep me from browsing the web on work hardware.

@alice @eldersea
That was a handy feature. Also excellent for hotel rooms where they've chosen to provide the room with a remote that doesn't have certain features like menu access (all I want from my hotel TV is accessible wifi and an HDMI so I can plug in my own device).

I've been known to pay them back for the inconvenience by blocking right wing news channels.

@alice Pi-Hole https://pi-hole.net

@alice And don't even get me started on how people use and want smart TVs

@alice@lgbtqia.space I can't believe there are people out there just raw-dogging the internet, completely exposed to trackers and obnoxious ads assaulting their senses.

@alice @calvin What's your protection of choice these days?

@alice

Not to mention the additional power consumption/battery drain

At times I am "forced" to use a regular browser with no extensions, hosts file, pi-hole or similar. And I actually audibly curse every. Single. Time.

Also, countdown till someone boasts about their datacap

@alice It always surprises me when people complain about ads, because I would have expected them to have tried solving their issue, or be asking about a way to solve it. Not judging, just odd.

I rarely see an ad to the point where I'm viscerally offended when I do. At the risk of sounding boomerish, I'm not sure exactly when, but some time between the 90s and now ads when from, "Let me show you how great my product is!" to "Let our marketing team jerk themselves off because fuck our customers"

@Sagaliciouzzz @alice

You can hardly blame them for clicking “Accept All”, since attempting to reject cookies will often lead the user down a rabbit hole of dark patterns, instead of accessing whatever site you actually wanted to see.

Firefox + uBlock Origin (and custom filter lists) happily helps me reject and not see such things on the pages I visit

@alice

Horribly. It's horrible. I don't know how to help them.

We have to burn it down.

@alice@lgbtqia.space @aly@mastodon.nz I have both uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger, but I don't know if they are redundant.

I thought about PiHole but it seems a bit overkill for me. Other than ad-blocking across the whole LAN, does it do something that uBlock doesn't? I worry about my roommates having something internet-related break on them because I'm putting something between them and the internet, and I'm just a common network moron.

@alice this could explain why so many people just talk to chatbots instead of actively browsing the internet

@drahardja Back in my days as a big-company software developer (30+ years ago), I turned off Javascript in my browser and caught flack from mgmt because they had a web page that had glitzy useless scripted stuff on it. There was also a group of us who used Linux, but had to reboot to Windows daily to log our hours. Nowadays I use pihole at home and am pretty happy with it.

@ricko @alice I installed Rethink DNS on my then stock Google Pixel a few months ago and a few minutes of seeing Google Play Services making requests once every 2 seconds was enough to eventually convince me to install GrapheneOS.

@alice @DavidNielsen Pet my effigy and tell it she's a good girl :3