Makeshift

Pi hole doesn't block youtube ads. Since they are served through the youtube.com domain, you'd be blocking youtube as well

same thing is happening to me. I might try making an account on another instance

it's kind of a shame we go to all the trouble to switch to the free and open fediverse and we still can't post links to pirated stuff

I definitely recommend trying Brave search. They are a completely independent search engine and it's got better results than DDG. I like their AI summarizer too

What's your opinion on the AI Summarizer in Brave Search? I actually quite like it. All the information is sourced from the search results and you can click the specific text to go to the source. It's very similar to Google's Featured Snippets, although it actually reminds me more of the autotldr bot from reddit

I agree the crypto stuff is super annoying, but it's a really nice and clean browser after you disable all that and tweak the settings (which you'd probably want to go through and configure with a new browser anyway)

yeah just about every post had a comment saying "OP is a repost bot" and I constantly saw bots copying comments in threads for karma

I like open board, but I wish it had better text prediction. I would love a privacy respecting keyboard that predicts what I'm going to say. Years ago I had Microsoft SwiftKey so well trained I usually barely even need to type, just hit the suggestions

yeah I remember the reddit interface being uninuititve, confusing, and really hard to learn when I started out. I just got used to it

unfortunately this is pretty niche software so it's hard to tell either way. A number of his other uploads have comments however.

What about downloading the torrent and testing it using a clean throwaway Windows install on a separate drive? And afterwards running a few different virus scans and check the task scheduler etc to see if there are any suspicious changes. Does this sound like a good strategy? Is there anything I should look out for in particular?

I realized just after I posted and edited the link out. Did that not work? or are you referring to something else?