I’ve posted this a couple times in similar threads on Reddit, and never really got any speculation. Of course nobody can have a definitive answer, but I’d be super interested to hear what anyone else thinks.
So I had just gotten out of Army basic training about a month prior, and had my first drill at my first unit. It was a pretty long drill, about 5 days, so I was already pretty out of it, and not to mention nervous as hell after meeting my chain of command, etc.
Come the final day of drill we get out really late, like the latest allowable time, 11:59 or some crazy shit. I lived about 2.5 hours away from my unit, and had ROTC PT at 6am the morning after. I was dead exhausted.
I started to leave and got on the turnpike and about 10 minutes into this drive I could already feel the sleep hitting me hard, and I had to pee really bad. I found the first rest station and decided to stop there, pee, and grab a coffee, and maybe a meal. I dragged myself from the car into the station, and walked in a haze towards the bathrooms. Within like, 10 seconds, I realized there was a woman at the sink washing her hands. I was confused for about 5 seconds, then realized my mistake, turned right around and went for the male bathrooms.
I decided to take a stall to sit down and relax for a couple minutes as the rest station was pretty dead. In fact, there was nobody else in the bathroom. I didn’t give it a second thought, and sat down. About 2-3 minutes later I saw 4 sandled feet standing infront of my stall door. Not slightly near the door, but - get this - almost feet sticking under the gap, toes directly facing me. These were not children’s feet either, for sure two grown men.
My heart starts pounding out of my chest. I wait 5 minutes more, and they’re STILL standing right there. What the FUCK is going?!!!
I try to calm myself, take a couple deep breaths and allow myself to think straight. By now it’s been about 10 minutes of them standing right there. I can hear them speaking in Spanish about “this man right here” though my Spanish isn’t that great. I decide to text my dad my location, and tell him to call the police if I don’t respond in 45 minutes.
15 minutes now.
20
30
…
After about 40 minutes they FINALLY decide to leave. I don’t know where they might be waiting, probably outside the bathroom entrance. I text my dad to postpone another 20 minutes. I wait even longer until I hear another person walk in with a child like pitter patter of footsteps with him. They speak a bit, and it’s very audibly a man and his son.
Without even thinking about how me being targeted could put them in danger, I use the opportunity of witnesses being present to bolt from the stall. I didn’t care about washing my hands, and SUPER WALKED out of the rest station to my car, called my dad to ensure him I was fine, and told him what happened, then went on my way.
I still don’t know what the hell that was. Was I being targeted for “snooping” in the girl’s bathroom? Was a big supporter of the military about to shake my hand? Was I being targeted for being in uniform?
/r/resume was great, as well /r/cscareeradvice, and really any career centric subs. Being able to bounce career questions off of others is an absolute gold mine of information that only serves to forward the field.
If you’re navigating to another community on their instance, you won’t be logged in. When you’re seeing that, check the URL. If you’re on lemmy.ml, you’re still on your instance; if not, you’ve navigated to that instance.
There’s multiple ways to structure links, some of which will take you to that community via your instance, some not.
Could it be phishing? Sure. But far more likely, you’re just on another instance where you don’t have an account (or at least an active login).
I mean if you go to all then there is a bunch of porn. Maybe not local or subscribed obviously. But yeah. Mucho porn in the early stages just like the other site at the beginning
If you go to the lemmynsfw instance and just pre-emptively block all of the communities, it mostly disappears. Folks are (at least on my feed) being pretty good about keeping it all there.
Use a mail forwarding service to generate disposable e-mails used to sign up, if you accidentally give it to someone else it doesn’t expose any other accounts and can be easily replaced by a new one.
Use a password manager to ensure a strong and unique password.
Use a JavaScript blocker so you only allow the required JavaScript to make the website work and prevent automatic downloads.
I’ve been doing these in general recently and it’s good privacy a security practice. Also slowly replacing my main e-mail address in different service accounts with disposable forwarding e-mail addresses.
Edit: Other than that read a bit more about Lemmy and fediverse workings, verify what instance you’re viewing and navigate to the desired community via your instance as others have mentioned.
Honestly, I think the #1 problem to be concerned about right now is that there a lot of people self-hosting for the very first time, that maybe don’t really have much experience with hosting or moderation. It’s tough! There can be a lot of drama, random software failures, lost data, and disappointments that can happen. An instance can go under at random, at any time.
It sounds bad. In practice, the day-to-day can be fairly smooth sailing. A lot of people just kind of need the experience, need to make sure they’re not the one person moderating thousands of people on a serer. Making sure that moderation is a community effort, that the server has backups, and that there are channels for donations to support the instance - those things go a long way towards long-term stability.
Third party apps present a username and password field to log into a Lemmy instance. They can easily just steal your credentials. There are standard auth flows to solve this problem. The fact that Lemmy devs have willfully ignored this issue for years, and that they aren’t warning users not to trust third party apps, lead me to believe they don’t really care about security, which is the biggest red flag. There’s finally an open github issue that seems to be acknowledged, but it’ll be some time before this feature (if ever) ever gets implemented.
-Posted from a third-party app; yea, i gave them my password blindly.
This is something I really like Mastodon for. The good apps will go through standard OAuth authentication rather than username/password authentication, which also means you can use passkeys/2FA to protect your account which apps often don’t bother implementing in any way.
That said, who’s to say the in-app browser window you’re entering your password into is really your browser and not just a malicious Chrome build the evil app developers added to mislead you? There’s a slightly elevated risk with storing your password in every app, but malicious app developers will be able to phish you regardless.
The way Reddit did this was by just giving out a token, that could be done in the same way here on lemmy, I think that would solve the issue.
Now it’s true that you will be redirected to the site (here lemmy) but that’s the same on all services, as a user one needs to check the host name and certificate of the site they’re directed to.
There’s finally an open github issue that seems to be acknowledged, but it’ll be some time before this feature (if ever) ever gets implemented.
Fwiw, the devs seem quite open to (even directly requesting) people coding features they want and having them added into the main code in future versions. So if anyone is able and willing to make a working version of that for Lemmy, it could be added quite soon, really.
I suspect what will happen with the Federated universe as a whole is what happened to Linux - companies will start using the products, contribute to them, and it becomes this weird corporate/open source hybrid as the main devs, however good, simply won’t have the same level of resources as say FAANG to throw at these problems
Not really creepy, but the scariest thing to happen to me was traveling through Europe with two friends, we’re all women. We arrive in Paris and exit the metro and ride the escalator up to the street, and froze. It was, according to the directions on the hostel website, the correct metro stop, but the area immediately felt dangerous to the three of us. The space surrounding the elevators were encased by chain-link fencing, and bodies were pressed against them all up and down the sides. There were fights breaking out, yelling, etc, and it was mostly men. I don’t have problems with men or anything, but… yeah, it was scary.
So we stand there for a bit trying to figure out what to do. The directions on the website said to exit the metro and follow the building numbers “up” to get to the hostel, which was a good 15 minute walk for us. So we decide, okay, no biggie, we’ll exit the fence area and just start heading in a direction and follow the numbers on the buildings, figure out which way is which and just bolt ahead without stopping to talk with anyone.
And that’s what we do. Except every single number on the side of every building is 18. Over and over again as we walk, it’s all 18. And we can’t see any other numbers. So we pause, because there was no other direction on the website, just “follow the numbers up”, but there was no “up” or “down”, just 18.
We stand there for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do. I was the only one who had traveled overseas before, and the other two started to seriously panic, and I know I had to make some kind of decision, because we didn’t feel safe just standing there and if the panic really set in for them this would become much harder.
These two men walk by, and one of them catches the terrified look of one of my friends, and asks in perfect (but british-accented) English: “Are you ladies okay? Are you lost?” And we’re like: “Yes! Do you know how to get to this hostel?” And he looks at the name and says: “Yes, I know where this is, and you’re going in the wrong direction.” Then he pauses and says: “This area is pretty dangerous, its on our way, we can show you.” Then, he points down this particularly dark (it was daytime), narrow alley and says: “we’re just stopping by a place to eat this way, would you like to come?”
And this was where a decision had to come in. On one hand, the area we were in wasn’t good, and even though we knew which direction to head in now, I didn’t feel safe walking there. I didn’t feel very safe walking back to the metro we’d just left 3 or so blocks down. On the other hand, I didn’t really feel much better following a random guy and his friend down a dark alley in hope he might be telling the truth and escort us to our hostel after eating.
Literally, in my head I’m running the chance of us fighting these two guys off if they attack. I could get in a good hit, and my one friend is perry strong and capable, but my other friend would be useless. So I’m thinking of some sort of defence plan where I both help my one friend fight but also pull my other friend out if the way, because yeah, we decided to follow these guys into the dark alleyway of Paris and hope he was as kind and harmless as he seemed.
We got to the Caffe and sit down for a nice lunch and his friend goes to the restroom. And the guy tells us how they’re artists and paint giant murals on the sides of large buildings, and he was super nice. Eventually I asked if his friend was okay cause he was in the bathroom for a while and he told me yeah, that he’s just shooting up in there.
Oh, okay.
We ate lunch and they escorted us to the hostel and we give him some snacks we brought from home as a thank you and they were off.
And there was a fucking metro station right in front of the hostel! One that was NOT listed anywhere on the hostel website. Fuck that hostel, never again!
I’d go back to Paris though, 9/10, it was a good time.
I don’t know, it was weird. Lots of people had towels on the ground with a bunch of random items on them, trying to sell the stuff I think, but it wasn’t in an arranged way that a flea market would be. At one point a huge fight broke out and a group of people scattered about just picked up all their stuff in one big scoop and ran off, but others stayed and it was kind of chaotic. The fights were like heavy pushing and shouting back snd forth and stuff. No knife fights that I saw or anything.
I think we asked, but I don’t remember what the explanation was. I’ll reach out to my friend to see if she remembers.
To this day, the hostel we stayed at in Paris is the worst of all that I’ve stayed at before, and I’ve stayed in a lot! The employees weren’t very friendly, and I found most of the people in the city friendly in general, so… it was an off trip, lol.
They only sting when they feel threatened. Gently wave them away when they approach you. Don’t let them just land on you freely, because that will up the chances of them just landing in a fold or corner of your clothes and freaking out.
Been to a few psychiatrists and work with a lot as a clinician. For a first meeting you should expect to give a lot of history including familial history, treatment history, substance use history, medication history, diagnosis history, trauma history, developmental history, etc. Skip any that aren’t relevant to you and if you can’t give tons of info that’s okay (eg if you don’t have tons of info on your early development just give what you can, you can skip substance use if you’ve never had issues with it, etc). description of presenting problems including what you’re coming in for but also cooccurring physical issues that may be relevant (eg chronic ailments like diabetes/gerd/migraines) as well as sleep quality.
You may not touch on all of this, it may include other stuff, depends on the doctor. Each practitioner has their own personal approach but those are the broad strokes. Assuming you’re in the USA remember your rights as a consumer: you have the right to know why you are being prescribed a medication, you have the right to know it’s side effects, and you have the right to know alternatives to it. But at the same time remember side effects aren’t always experienced and for some people being aware of them makes them more likely to occur (I am one of those people fwiw)
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