There was a thread about this coincidentally exactly one year ago, give or take three hours. Ah, to be back in January 2020

I've been poking around on the fediverse again and I figured I'll never start using it unless I'm following some people. So, who here is on it? Please share some other people you follow, if you like.

I made an account a while back, and it was on the default instance since I didn't know any others to choose. I feel like it's a deliberate choice though (if nothing else it will give me a more curated timeline to scroll through) so I'd like to be deliberate about it at some point.

Hi Tildes. Hopefully this thread will be both a good discussion and helpful to some of you, and hopefully me.

As I'm guessing most of you know, data backups are quite important and it is best to have at least one copy locally and another copy somewhere else. At the moment, I store photos on an external hard drive and Google Drive, photos from my phone on Google Photos with copies of important original quality files saved locally, and everything else on drives in my PC and a network drive on my Raspberry Pi. It's far from ideal, I've only got one copy of some files and three or four of some others so I've been looking for something better to keep everything organised, safe and in one place.

I've tried the free trial of Backblaze, which seemed the obvious choice, but it had a few problems. I couldn't backup my Pi's network share, and in general it's a bit clunky and difficult to use. It is marketed as an easy solution to backing up data, but in doing this it just makes everything more difficult, at least for me - I know what I want backed up, and I would prefer to select it manually, but by opting in everything for backup by default you have to spend ages excluding the folders you don't want saved, one-by-one, in a UI that is difficult to use and often unclear. Sometimes the exclusions list just doesn't work - the Program Files folders are meant to be excluded by default and they were listed under exclusions but were backing up anyway. For me it found over 200,000 files, and because they were all so small it barely managed to backup 100MB in three hours. (Not that I know where the files come from because they aren't listed in the Windows app in any vaguely comprehensible way.)

So I need to find something else, and I was hoping someone here would have some recommendations. Personally I need it to:

• Be affordable and easy to setup and use
• Backup external and network drives to the cloud (physically keeping another drive somewhere else isn't an option for me)
• Be trustworthy and have strong commitments to security and privacy
• Work well for my use case: preferably automatic from Windows

Looking forward to any comments or recommendations. Thanks!

Hello people of Tildes, long time no see! As per title, since some point last week I've begun receiving calls from extra-EU countries I've never had any contact with (Haiti, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia just to name a few).

No doubt it is part of a call back scam; of course I have never picked up nor redialed, still, this seriously blows as I've now been woken up twice at 3am during the week.

Now, I've never had such a problem before, nor have I recently posted my number online anytime recently. Has anyone here had a similar issue? What can I do about it (I'm from the EU if that might help)? Is there any way for me to find out where my number was leaked from?

I have just now installed NoPhoneSpam from f-droid, but have no idea how good of a fix that will be.

Let me know if y'all have any ideas, thanks :)

A lot of people are currently switching over from WhatsApp to Signal right now, and the two are comparable enough that Signal can pretty much act as a drop-in replacement for WhatsApp. They have very comparable features, and Signal is easy enough to use that it's adoptable by non-techy people.

Does something similar exist for Facebook? I'm fully aware of the network effects that keep people on Facebook, but let's pretend a lot of people wanted to leave that platform and migrate elsewhere. Is there anything that has a similar featureset and that is usable by the general population?