Asklemmy

I've been having a ton of fun, I like the cultural exchange a lot.

Personally I don't care if China has data on me, it's not like it's useful for them and I'd rather them than meta or the US government or whoever.

There's also way more queer/trans content than I was expecting.

I generally try to avoid using apps. I use Lemmy, WhatsApp, banking, email, and the New York Times quiz app. That's it.

It's been amazing, honestly. The people on both sides have been having an eye opening experience seeing what's behind the digital wall that has been knocked down.

No FOSS clients, nobody's got time to reverse engineer it as it happened so fast.

As for privacy, well, it uses plain HTTP for at least all the media, so, not very private. It requests less permissions than Meta's apps however, and only asks when the feature is needed (for example, the Nearby page requests GPS which makes sense). It does seem to like to paste my clipboard which is not very cool, no idea what it's doing with it. I use a VPN for it.

It's still a chinese app under the control of the CCP. Personally, I'd rather China have my data than the US, because at least for China it's useless whereas with the current administration in the US, who knows what they do with that data.

As for the app itself, it's pretty nice. Don't expect free speech, but the rules also make it for a rather respectful and positive experience overall. For what it's intended to be (share cats, recipes, makeup, and other entertainment content) it's pretty good and a breath of fresh air compared to the non-stop political fighting on other platforms. That said it's not as censored as some assume it is: if it's presented tastefully you can usually get away with it. Respect and honesty gets you far on there whereas lies and aggression gets you banned. I've seen guns, LGBTQ, cars, religion, politics, comparing capitalism and communism. They're talking about Elon's nazi salute on there and all.

The massive cultural exchange going on there is quite enjoyable. People from all sorts of countries are trying out new recipes and adapting them to their local taste. Turns out mandarin isn't so bad to learn either. Very welcoming community. Rumors are it made the chinese government consider relaxing the great firewall. The sentiment is very anti-war as people from enemy countries are building online friendships.

I approach it with caution, but I've been rather please with what I see.

It is fun, it's less brain rot than tiktok, closer to what pixelfed and Instagram is but even then it is different, I think it's more like Pinterest or pixiv but for every day shit

Privacy wise, you're assigned a country by your IP and in china specifically it shows your exact region, you can view posts based on proximity.

You'll have your data harvested for recommendations obviously, but the ads don't seem to have this happen to them, they don't seem to feed their data to ads so they're all very general and based on what you searched up instead

I think xiahongshu is better than tiktok in terms of privacy, but the censorship I do not know about, but I haven't been blocked yet.

You can try it out, you lose nothing by doing so, just know it's nearly all Chinese

I don't understand how anyone would like using a platform managed by the CCP? Post a picture of tank man on your Red Note account and report back how it went.