I have an 8 node pi cluster that hosts a bunch of different things. They are pretty great.

It’s it basically the same idea as a residential proxy? Using user browsers to scrape sites and then sell for AI training.

That’s not how it works at all. You are talking about “thinking” models, which are just models prompting themselves.

LLMs are fancy next word predictors. It’s just returning what mathematically is the next likely word given their training set (really token since it doesn’t actually understand words).

Maybe they should focus on making a great platform instead of a shitty one. Just an idea.

But how does a VPN prevent those things?

It doesn’t, at least not for the average user. It might prevent your ISP from looking at your traffic, but modern networks are far better in that regard with encrypted SSL traffic and DNS than it used to be.

A VPN is just someone else’s Internet connection. The average person does not get any benefits.

I think that’s the overall goal. Much harder to block ads and they can collect a ton more data.

It’s what made me finally check out lemmy.

That would be nice, but not likely to happen. It would be difficult once they are merged.

We don’t have a functioning government. If we did this wouldn’t be allowed along with the other massive consolidations going on.

I second XMPP. Conversations is great and its really easy to host your own prosody server.