

Just as a mild counterexample, I’ve personally changed my views quite drastically over my time on reddit and now lemmy, and most of it was from individuals just sharing their own perspective.
I held some latent bigotry and misogyny, part of which I picked in my day to day life, and partly from 4ch. I won’t say I’ve eliminated it completely, but I think I’ve become a better person from my interactions online.
If we’re not out here trying to actively learn from and help other people, then what the heck are we doing?
I think VPN is the proper way to go about this, but another method is to do port knocking with fkwnop so your SSH port won’t respond until the host receives a magic packet.