I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with you, my comment was intended to add the context that might help English readers understand how the natural conclusion they would reach after learning that the app name directly translates to “little red book” isn’t necessarily true.

For me, as an American English speaker the natural conclusion would be that it’s an application designed by maoists in order to discuss Maoism when it’s actually designed for integrated ecommerce.

Just a heads up for people reading this:

小红书 is a Chinese language app (it added translation just a week or so ago!). The founder claims to have chosen the color red and the 红 part of the name because of his Alma mater stanford [!]. The app is pretty much targeted at lifestyle influencers and women and features prominent shopping and payment integration.

English speakers nicknamed the book Quotations from Chairman Mao the “little red book”. The Chinese nickname is 红宝书 “treasured red book” or “cherished red book”, not “little red book”.

Many posts on 小红书 are making light of the fact that Americans flocked to the bored housewife shopping app.

No social media is decent on privacy.

They’re not private. They’re public. You don’t have the expectation of privacy in public. That’s why people might dress differently walking to the store than they do in their bedrooms.

Social media is an osint treasure trove. It’s lowkey why the idea of osint exists. Don’t expect to have privacy in public spaces like social media and you’ll never be surprised.

This may come as a surprise to you, but lemmy is social media.

小红书 is not private. It’s social media and if what another user said is true then the app version uses plaintext http to transfer data. It’s up to you to determine if that’s a problem for you.

Use a vpn in or around China and your performance might be better. I get a lot of hangs with mullvad us servers.

It’s a nice experience. Check it out if you like.

So that we’re 100% clear, the site and app only stopped working in the us.

If you were in the us on a browser and used a fresh cache and a vpn in another country it worked fine, famously Canadian users used the time to shit talk American users while they “couldn’t” hear.

While there’s an argument to be made that the law only explicitly prohibits new downloads (distribution) it also makes reference to maintaining the service. A company that wanted to continue running the company without any ability to gain American users could attempt to skirt that, but eagle eyed readers of law will recognize that sec2.a.1.B pretty much squashes that. Not only does it make datacenters in the us and elsewhere culpable, but the generally held legal definition of words like “internet hosting services”, “distribution”, “maintenance”, “updating” and “application” are not the narrow often colloquial meanings we’re used to, but broad definitions intended to give the maximum applicability to laws regardless of specific technology involved.

So I think unless bytedances strategy was to explicitly skirt the law and try to keep the servers up for the American users then the “correct” decision was to follow the letter of the law until the new regime that had promised to offer a stay was in power and made that offer officially and in writing.

From a business perspective, for a company caught between two regimes, giving the “win” to the one you’ll definitely be working with longer is a no brainer.

I haven’t seen significant right wing or pro trump content on TikTok after it came back on. I have seen plenty of users saying thank you president trump with a whole spectrum of intonation and doing thinking emoji at the message when it came back on. I also haven’t seen decent analysis of its algorithms behavior since then, which makes sense because making a decent analysis of such a black box would take time.

Changes to a persons recommendations take time. The way that 小红书 surfaces this by changing the “reels” offered to the users explore page when they’ve accumulated enough information to make a change and finished processing it.

Part of what made TikTok’s algorithm and recommendations seem so magical is that it had a really good way of spicing things up and not getting stuck in a rut and because there was only one scrolling feed, changes to recommendations were just suddenly there.

Just having said that and having experienced the rinky-dink recommendations after the downtime I don’t think it was a shut down specifically for changes (although they definitely did, why would t you take the opportunity to update everything if you’re doing mandated spin down?) but because it was the smart legal choice.

It went dark after the judicial review process found that the law was constitutional.

The important thing to recognize is that the site stopped operating in the us (which it said it would do in reaction to this decision) after it was clear that it would definitely be violating a law with explicit consequences if it continued.

One unremarked-upon aspect of the events between Saturday and Sunday was the arson of a representative’s office in retribution for the ban.

Combined with the crappy algorithm after the shutdown (indicates they gotta actually rebuild all the recommendations), it’s likely that the company shut the site down to be in compliance, intending to go back up if possible once the law was reversed or the new administration was in power, and was offered assurances against legal action and protection against the law after the representatives office was set on fire.

When you use mullvad you create a sixteen digit id. You don’t tie an account or email to it, just your secret code.

If I wanted to answer your question I’d make an account, put five bucks on it using whatever means are functional and quick (a credit card or something) and see how it works. Mullvad is €5 no matter how many months you buy in advance so it’s not a huge deal or commitment to find out.

Once you’ve bought a month using the least privacy respecting (this is debatable) method you can figure out if it will work for you.

You may find out that you need to use mullvads encrypted dns service and/or their browser proxy setup. Using the encrypted DNS doesn’t require the use of mullvads vpn servers so you might be able to resolve the isp blocking tor that way without needing to buy mullvad.

If you find out in that month that everything is working right, re-up another month in your low privacy way then make a new account and select the use cash option. They’ll give you a code to write down. Send a big bill with that use cash code to Switzerland and in a few weeks you’ll have relatively private vpn access.

E: since the barrier to entry of €5 and some way to transfer it might be too high, you can also try to contact mullvads servers. Make an account and don’t fund it, but create a device profile and a configuration (or install their software). If your error is that the account isn’t funded as opposed to that the servers are unreachable then you’re probably fine.