I’m coming at it from the opposite side; social media isn’t a reasonable alternative to RSS, but people often use it as such. RSS is as you say, for getting updates from specific sources without being at the mercy of a third-party’s recommendation algorithm.
Nobody is interested in finding an RSS feed. People are interested in getting updates when writers they like post new writing, when bands they like post new tour dates, etc…
One of the use cases I have in mind is styling an RSS feed as a web page and including a short explanation of how to use it. That comes with a need to suggest specific software.
I’m not very aggressive about disabling[0] notifications. I don’t install apps that try to sell me stuff or otherwise manipulate me though so it’s rare I get unwanted notifications.
Quite a few commercial apps have perfectly good websites, and I use those in preference to apps most of the time.
[0] Technically just not enabling; Android now requires them to ask for permission before sending any
That’s true in the sense that if a very sophisticated organization directly targets your family chat for surveillance, they’re going to find a way to access its content no matter what communication method you use.
Threat modeling is core to security, and that kind of threat probably isn’t the issue here. Mass surveillance, both government and corporate is, and neither is likely to secretly install malware on a family-members phone that can access the contents of the group chat. Doing that to large numbers of people would get them caught; they save it for valuable targets.
Governments openly forcing the install of spyware, as I’ve read China does in some cases would be an exception; you cannot have a secure conversation involving a device so compromised.
On X11 systems, XScreenSaver is two things: it is both a large collection of screen savers; and it is also the framework for blanking and locking the screen.
In the modern era, the main purpose of a screen saver is to lock the screen, and has been for most users for a long time. Many of us would also like to have pretty pictures on our locked screens.
It no longer has anything to do with preventing burn-in, so you’re right from a certain point of view.
The line here is always arbitrarily set, so you’d want to look up what it is at your specific company.
There are very likely laws defining where that line can be set, as Dippy’s comment suggests. It is very likely that the employer is legally obligated to pay an hourly employee for any time they require that employee to be on site, which would include employer-mandated security checks.
They can be my really close friends or family and ask me for an account, which I would actively discourage (join something well-run like .world) but eventually allow if they really wanted to.
Do I trust that vanilla Lemmy code doesn’t contain something nefarious, such as code that detects political positions it doesn’t like and reduces their visibility? Sure. It would be hard to hide something like that.
Do I trust that major servers aren’t secretly running software that manipulates content? Mostly yes. I think it would get noticed since there are lots of vanilla servers to compare behavior to.
Do I trust that all the software is well-designed and bug-free? I write software for a living. No software is bug-free and most of it isn’t well-designed.
Do I trust that everyone who runs a fediverse server isn’t an asshole? Absolutely not. Any jackass can run a server. I run a Mastodon server (on which all users are me).