Walking_coffin

In the rare case where you are actually not a troll, let me put it simply.

Your previous post was blocked for the behaviors of certain individuals in the comments, including you and the topic itself which was as good as spouting: "Why not use Google drive for sharing media? It's free and there is way less hassle than what all of you have been doing for decades. I am right you are wrong." .

Is it possible that plenty of people are wrong and have been doing things wrong for a long time? Yes, it is possible. In this case, bring good arguments, show proof, and debate. Do not bring baseless beliefs into an argument and say you are right about it.

The link to Z-Library itself is one of the legitimate ones from what I know so I wouldn't worry on that side too much.

PDFs have a few exploits that could infect a system. However they are rare and not efficient especially if the intent is to infect as much machines as possible.

If you don't have much technical knowledge to analyze the files yourself, I would recommend you open the PDFs in Virtual Machines without any acess to the internet or opening the files only when you have disconected your device from any acess to the internet.

Tools like the one mentionned by someone else in the comments would be good to prevent from having to worry about a potentially malicious PDF. Various tools are around to convert a malicious file lile PDFs into regular "trusted" PDFs (said tools flattens everything making it impossible to select text or click any URIs included). I would look up the trustworthiness of some of those tools first (to not try and avoid malwares by installing one).

That was way too long of a comment but I hope it could ease some of your worries.

Yes, as long as you practice good OPSec.

The first mistake you made was to ask about it. While logical to ask since you probably didn't know, you now have an increased risk of linkability. Is the risk enough of a threat? Your threat model and OPSec will determine that.

If your goal is wanting to avoid being identified, planning starts before doing any prior actions.

"100 Grumpy Animals" by Beast Flaps

Just to add to what you just said. Eternity 0.2.1 "release is functionally identical to v0.2.0"

The main issue seems to be the instance you're (OOP) currently on. If you do not want to migrate or want to wait to see if things will get resolved you can always browse in "anonymous" mode with a different instance than beehaw.

I have gotten the "there doesn't seem to be anything here" error message a couple of times. Might be due to blocked or removed instances or posts (in my case at least).

Some lemmy apps (on Android) have different ways to handle things. I have been using Eterniry on and off after the recent update it got and I can tell it's much faster than Jerboa for loading images and posts but the overall UI seems slower. I tried mulitple apps as well in the past and they all have their own sets of issues which is to be expected.

The rate limiting error may also be due to you logging onto multiple devices/apps at once. A few days ago I had the same issue when I logged off and logged back in with Jerboa and Eternity within a small interval of time.

If you suspect your ISP, test with proxies and wireguard obfuscation within the mullvad app on your phone (and desktop as well if you want more accurate results, like that you can have more than just one result from one device). Try also to change your country to one that is closer to you to see if you might see some difference. It could be that you get timed out by the servers you're trying to reach with the VPN tunnel that you're using.

I made a rough guide of my setup for someone wanting to download videos from their browser. Since Seal uses yt-dlp, it will work with Youtube as well.

Hope this can help you out

Glad that it was useful and that I could be of help.

Setup:

Download Seal and go to Settings > General. From there click on the update yt-dlp to make sure you're on the latest yt-dlp build. No head to Custom command > New template. Put your label of choice and in the "Command template" section put in your custom command.

To create a good custom command I highly recommend you browse TheFrenchGhosty's Ultimate YouTube-DL Scripts Collection's Watch on Mobile Devices Script to get an idea of what you would want (I'll give an example template later on based on theirs).

Once your command is done click "Done". If you have not configured the output directory yet, go to Settings > Download directory > Custom command directory (Usually you'll want this in the Download folder. On android: /storage/emulated/0/Download/ Make sure to have "Configure before download" under Settings > General, enabled. From there, exit the app.

Go to the app you want to download your media from (ie. Browser, Youtube). If you are in a browser, long press the url bar of your link and click "Share". You will be presented a menu to share the selected link. Long press on the Seal icon marked as "Quick Download". You will be presented with a way to pin the app. This will allow this specific app you're in to have Seal be presented right away when you want to share a link and be prompted with the "Configure before download" menu. From there, select "Commands" as "Download type" and click on the template's label you created earlier. You can now click "Download" and enjoy.

You could avoid the hussle of setting up a custom command and tweak a few things in the app's offered options. I just prefer to use my usual commands that I use to download on my phone as well.

As for the command, here's a short template I just made from modifying TheFrenchGhosty's scripts as mentionned above (haven't tested it but should theoritically work):

yt-dlp --format "(bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=1080][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=1080]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=720][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=720]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=480][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=480]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=360][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=360]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=240][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=240]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=144][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=144]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1])+(bestaudio[acodec^=mp4a]/bestaudio)/best" --force-ipv4 --sleep-requests 1 --sleep-interval 5 --max-sleep-interval 30 --ignore-errors --no-continue --no-overwrites --add-metadata --parse-metadata "%(title)s:%(meta_title)s" --parse-metadata "%(uploader)s:%(meta_artist)s" --no-write-description --check-formats --concurrent-fragments 4 --output "%(title)s - %(uploader)s (%(upload_date)s).%(ext)s --merge-output-format "mkv" --throttled-rate 100K

Not all the info here is relevant for each use cases but I hope this gives ideas and helps even a bit.

If you do not download often or don't mind the longer time it might take you can do the following.

Before the URI (URL if you prefer) of the post, put view-source:, you can then proceed to search with the "Find in page" tool, or however it might be named for your android browser. In the case of this site you'll usually search for mp4 files so just search ".mp4" and you should find the file you want to download.

Sometimes you might find different file extensions on the same site for the same type of post because the uploader' files are directly the ones being posted and not converted by the site itself. In this case you can browse the source a little by searching for a potential name of the file or a HTML tag.

If that is too much of a hassle, I believe applications like Seal (found on FDroid) are able to download from such websites. There's no reason for it not to since it uses yt-dlp.

Hope that helps.

PS: If you decide to use Seal I could share a very fast workflow if it happens to work.

You did mention a "main drive". I don't know what's taking all that space on your SSD but if you have a media library that takes some space you could move that to a connected HDD. While HDDs aren't good as a boot drive it does the job well enough with most "standard" quality media. So can be said for documents and more obviously. You can then auto-mount your other drive to be inside your home directory for seemless access.

One thing that isn't mentionned but I'll just say this just in case. Always have external backups. I've scared myself way too many times thinking I had lost my main drive's data just to find it the next day on one of my backup. Really a life saver if your setup has a problem where you find that one forum post from 12y ago with a "Nvm I fixed it" marked as [FIXED].

Other than that, thanks for sharing and with the solution at that.

Please do share. What better thing to do than to take a break from a broken install to read about someone's own hardship with the endless quest that is maintaining a rolling-release distro.