They want your ID because they’re legally forced to. A VPN will fix it.

They should implement bot detection that looks at the volume of posts and duplicate posts posted across the whole fediverse from one account, bayesian and LLM based filters to detect spam programmatically, PoW to slow down bots which get through.

As well as checking for signs of automation (Puppeteer/Selenium/Playwright) and suspiciously fast or perfect mouse movement in the web client, and showing a captcha to post/comment in the mobile client.

I don’t think most instances do any of that at the moment, and what looked to be a fake Gofundme ended up on the front page, from an account which was absolutely spamming Mastodon relentlessly.

Look at MVNOs. They use the big three networks (Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T) but are much cheaper because you are not paying the uninformed tax.

Have you tried asking why they want to move back?

You should give Timeshift a try. It is Mint’s own backup tool, and it is focused on the OS rather than the whole drive, so if you write a document then the system breaks, you can roll back without losing the document. You can then use the seperate Backup Tool to backup documents.

You should also turn on the built in firewall, increase the frequency of notifications in the update manager, and install Flatseal to disable permissions for things you don’t trust for better security.

You should then turn on unverified Flatpaks in the software manager. It does give you security warnings however you should be okay if you only use unofficial ports for open source software and you quickly check that the ports themselves are open source.

And finally for MS Office documents, you can install OnlyOffice and FreeOffice for in case LibreOffice doesn’t render a file correctly.

If you have an account with them you should remove the recovery email and credit card. Those are the two things they can share AFAIK.

What about IVPN?

Zorin actually has Flatpak as well.

Did you try using the built in Software app first?

Which issues did you have with Zorin?

It depends on the site. For a blog PoW is perfect, however if someone like Facebook or YouTube switched to only PoW then the spam would entirely dominate and make the site unusable.

It only slows down bots. If a bot is willing to do the PoW then it can get right through.

Of course forks should also work, but make sure resistFingerprinting is off and WebGL is allowed.

That can be caused by how the browser is set up. If you use Firefox with resistFingerprinting disabled and the only privacy extension being uBlock Origin then the sites should work fine.

You said “Firefox derivative” so resistFingerprinting may be enabled and WebGL blocked. If you’re talking about Librewolf, you should turn those off, then use Jshelter to get the non-breaking protection back.

A standard Firefox is not private and is easily fingerprintable. Those settings give you good privacy but won’'t make most captchas fail.

It should work if you use a Firefox based browser with tracking protection set to strict and resistFingerprinting disabled, then use Jshelter with the following settings.

• Locally rendered images: Little lies
• Locally generated audio: Little lies
• WebAssembly speed-up: Enabled
• Everything else including Fingerprint Detector disabled

Then visit fingerprint.com in a normal window, then visit it again in private mode with a VPN or with a dufferent server selected. You will see that the ID is different both times which proves that you’re protected.

As for the adblocker, just use uBlock Origin with the Quick Fixes list disabled as it may shadowban YouTube comments because their bot protection is silent.