I think I saw a post a few days ago about some Lemmy admins using scripts to detect and delete users/communities that seem to be getting randomly created by bots for unclear purposes.

No, I understand that.

My point is that I think TikTok has a user base that is far less likely to care about privacy, openness of platforms, etc. In my opinion, it’s an app that is built for and used primarily people that don’t care. You can tell them over and over about its privacy abuses, you name it, and they won’t leave.

Reddit and Twitter tend to have older and more often nerdier users that are more likely to know about/understand/care about these issues and react accordingly.

I am not trying to be condescending, but I get the feeling you may not be as versed in privacy matters. Those other social media apps require access to huge amounts of information about you and everything you do on your device. Location, location history, health and fitness info, contacts, browsing history, etc. Depending on what company we’re talking about, that info is used to generate detailed targeted profiles to sell to advertising companies, and possibly also to train in-house AI models. Lemmy doesn’t do that because it’s a community driven and hosted platform whose goal is not to sell the information generated by its users.

Woof. I’m glad I’m not the only one that’s done these things!

I want to say that you’re right, but I’m not NEARLY as familiar with *BSD or it’s history as I am with Linux. My understanding, though, is that iOS/macOS are based upon Darwin, and that Darwin derives a fairly significant portion of its code base from BSD. So, in part I believe the answer is yes.

As a total side note: do you have a recommendation for a good BSD derivative distribution to try? I’ve tried probably 15 Linux distros, but never made it to BSD-world!

I did rm -r * / the first time I ever jailbroke an iPhone by spazzing and hitting enter before I’d finished typing the full command. (I’m terrible at mobile typing.) I’ll never forget the full body sweat that put me in immediately.

Or my personal favorite: karmawhoring bots reposting content stolen from other peoples’ OnlyFans accounts.

Personally I don’t think there is anything they could do gain trust short of undoing their data harvesting. Which would destroy them as a business entity/platform.