Look into threat modelling, we’re all striving for more privacy-friendly ways to keep in touch with people, and if you seal yourself off too early, you’ll suffocate.

I know my friends and colleagues well in person, they know that I’m a privacy nut, and we agree to not report me missing just because I’m unreachable on a particular day. But knowing that they SMS each other their plans and that I’m probably not a target of the state, I’m cool texting them things like when we’re eating out together.

Also don’t be disheartened, I keep at it even though my methods are nowhere near airtight. Even if every move of mine is known, the surveillance capitalists will at least know that I am flipping them off and trying my best to make their jobs hard.

I don’t. I just stay “insane”.

Finding things to do is a matter of picking up the phone and calling my friends and asking them what they’re doing and inviting them to do things I’m doing.

Nope. I value my privacy and walk the talk. I do what I say and I dont care.

My life became so much more meaningful without social media and FB and WhatsApp in my life. So much more space to go hiking and camping and whatever.

by not overwhelming myself.

i set up privacy slowly, and compartmentalize things that are not private and stop worrying if i can’t do anything about it. it’s ok if i can’t do any of that fully either.

do you ever feel like you have to choose between being ok or having friends and being private.

Not anymore.

my friends dont use private things so i have to deal with it or be calld werid

Then you have enemies, not friends.
Friends respect you for who you are, and that includes your privacy. Real friends OPSEC.

privacy to play games

LAN parties are pretty private.

I don’t. Writing this from the psych ward. The voices finally respect my privacy here.

It’s a struggle, for sure. I don’t þink I have any balance. I do a bare minimum wiþ uBlock - I used to try to do more but it eats up so much time and in a trade-off between living life and fighting web sites, it’s not top of my priorities. So I block about mid-level, and if a site doesn’t work I do someþing else if I can.

We keep our subscriptions to a minimum and self-host a lot of stuff, and don’t use LLMs. I’m in fortunate our family is accommodating and are willing to use DeltaChat for messaging. We do what we can, but when push comes to shove, we don’t fight too much; we’re lucky in þat we don’t have a lot of pressure to expose ourselves.

it gets a lot easier with time . making switches like os , browser , search engine , etc are all huge steps , then ditching big tech and replacing them with foss . it ’ s always hardest ditching some stuff becus of friends , but making new accounts on better and more private places and using those when you can . do you need help with specific switches to make ?

many people will treat u as crazy , it is sadly the world we are in where we have been taught that only criminals want privacy .

One day at a time, one thing at a time

Your point is very valid though, you could personally do everything right, but your co-workers, employer, friends, family, the people you live with, your school, the local supermarket etc will still completely fuck you over.

The best we can do is put the effort into what we can control, and hope that we have a positive effect on those around us.

You should also know when you are right, and respect yourself for that.

Moving away from windows, google, amazon, meta, twitter, spotify, whatsapp etc is not difficult, deal with those easy things first.

After many tormentous nights I’ve come to accept people a lot smarter than me are paid a lot more than me to make a buck off my back every way possible. I may not win the war, but I sure as hell don’t have to make it easy for 'em.

It does please me to read so, so many others are waking up to big data and the greed/selfish nature of data brokerage by turning on flock and data centers. Politicians might even jump on board if they can swindle enough votes.

Haha! Yeah, might… I know.

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