Hello.
I am part of the younger side of Lemmy, and I wonder if there are any teens or otherwise young people that have de-Googled and/or removed all social media.
I notice, that everybody around me in real life uses Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, what have you… hundreds of notifications and messages from other people… and I cannot really relate. I deleted Instagram for my mental health, as some posts were greatly affecting my self-esteem. If somebody were to ask me for my social media, I’d probably just give them my number.
I don’t really know a lot of people around me that have this interest of online privacy (let alone people my age). So, will the (young) users of Lemmy enlighten me?
Hey, I am 23yo and I have left instagram ~5 years ago because it was such a waste of time. After school, I’ve gotten more cautious in terms of what happens with my data, but even though I was using DuckDuckGo and FF for everything, I was still hooked on YouTube and my phones stock ROM. YT is my absolute favourite Social Media platform to this date. Only a few months ago, I had a good talk with a friend of mine, who is also into privacy. He told me about how awesome LibreTube is, and showed me, the import feature of it. Since the, I only rely on Gmails servers for K9-Mail, and Google maps. (Any suggestions besides OSM?) Since 2020, my entire friend group, and my close relatives all switched to Signal, and I’ve never been happier with a messenger app. The only thing that bothers me and my privacy friend, is that we still hang out on Discord, but there’s no way, we get our friends to migrate to another service, especially because there are no good alternatives with privacy in focus.
Since 8 months, I am running LineageOS with microG on it. When you’re a tinkerer, I can absolutely recommend microG, but I understand, that its not for everyone, especially when you rely on GPay.
For a Google Maps replacement, everything is going to work off of the base OSM maps, but OSMand is not a great app imo. Organic Maps is good if you want to be COMPLETELY FOSS, but if you want something with good navigation and real time traffic, Magic Earth is what you want. The app itself isn’t FOSS afaik, but it’s privacy oriented, has very few (if any?) trackers, and can be used completely offline.
Thank you, I’ll give Magic earth a try
I use organic maps on Android
Tip about osmand app. Use https://gps-coordinates.net to turn addresses into gps coords and use those in osmand. Makes things much easier. Also, consider getting an osm account and adding addresses to places you go.