Good time to switch to an open source degoogled android ROM and set up your own push notification server.
Until people stop giving up their freedom to these companies by agreeing to legal documents they don’t even read, it’s only going to get worse.
Lol you’re dreaming if you think even 0.1% of people will be interested in setting up their own server.
They’re also dreaming if they think doing these things doesn’t just make them stand out, and provides them any real protection from state actors.
The number one rule of tradecraft is to blend in. I promise that you haven’t thought of some way of using an always connected smartphone that the NSA hasn’t considered. They are probably the ones making your degoogled ROMs.
This is hubris, plain and simple. If your goal is to hide from state actors then the best way of doing that is to be uninteresting statistical noise.
That’s why I bothered to set up a nixOS config to deploy a docker cluster… I’m planning to give my friends and family a USB that connects to a private shared VPN, so all I have to do is walk them through booting from it
We all get a way to back up stuff with redundancy, and I’ll throw up a Jellyfish server, maybe set up some llm assistants to scrape the web for interesting news and put it in a Lemmy instance or something. These are all things I want for myself, and I am willing to configure it exactly once… At that point, might a well let people I trust join the cluster.
Even my technical family used to scoff and ask why bother… This last week when my sister called and asked what I was up to, instead of explaining that it’s more than just targeted ads, I asked if they noticed that everything sucks way more lately.
They never used to listen before… I think that’s changing. I think it’s time to build out alternatives
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I agree those are good things to do.
But… Blaming people who are being fucked over by forces generally outside their control is not really going to help their or our situation. Expecting or demanding “people” to just change is also not realistic. Even if they wanted to, time, effort, energy, knowledge, skills, and attention are all finite. This is just one important issue or source of exploitation among a sea of others.
But… Blaming people who are being fucked over by forces generally outside their control is not really going to help their or our situation.
The whole premise of the comment is that it’s not outside of their control, they just chose not to be responsible for the agreements they make. If you have any better suggestions than blaming those responsible for the situation I’m willing to listen and maybe even change my mind.
Expecting or demanding “people” to just change is also not realistic. Even if they wanted to, time, effort, energy, knowledge, skills, and attention are all finite.
Is it more unrealistic than “we” deciding to change and find a better path forward than surrendering our digital lives to strangers? I’m able to self-host my own push server. I wasn’t born with that knowledge. I had to invest time, effort and energy to gain the knowledge and skills. If I can, so can others. I am not an extraordinary smart person.
Still, long before one starts to self-host entire platforms like NTFY or Nextcloud Push, there’s a ton of free to use services ran by idealists rather than capitalists. Or payed options with good terms. There’s so much between just not caring and being ones own sysadmin that I don’t think “don’t have the time” is a valid excuse anymore. It’s not just push messages, it’s everything - as you point out:
This is just one important issue or source of exploitation among a sea of others.
Sure. And most people I offered a free Nextcloud account to said the same. And Mastodon/Friendica-accounts. And so on. It’s like a technological mass depression, we can’t do everything we need to so there’s no point doing anything at all.
And today I’m running a custom ROM and no push services from Big Data while they’re literally getting robbed of their phonebooks by Meta.
