I believe in an open internet, FOSS, privacy by default, etc. I migrated away from Google by self-hosting Nextcloud. I prefer messaging apps like Molly, SimpleX, Threema, Matrix, etc. over standard SMS. I love the Fediverse (Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.).
But everyone I live with and everyone I know simply refuses to take part. I can’t interact with them socially because they’re all on Facebook. I can’t communicate with them because they all use group texts for SMS/RCS. I feel like I’m living in a different part of the world and am completely disconnected from everything that’s going on around me (with the people I want to interact).
My question is: does anyone else experience this, and how do you reconcile it? I want to share photos and clever posts with my family but they aren’t on the Fediverse. I want to communicate securely with them but they only want to SMS. I want to share documents but they only use Google Docs.
There are people I’ve met on the Fediverse and through some secure messaging apps with whom I’ve struck up a rapport, but these are still (predominately) strangers, and I’d really like to involve the people I care about in these exciting new times. They just wont participate.
I feel like I’ve invited everyone in my family to go on a great, grand vacation away and I’m the only one who’s packed.
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I feel like I’ve invited everyone in my family to go on a great, grand vacation away and I’m the only one who’s packed.
From their perspective, you’re the fringe idealist who wants to move to a strange, remote place because of nebulous political ideology they neither understand nor wish to understand. And you are proposing that they uproot all of their preexisting social connections, support infrastructure, comfort, and familiarity to come live with you out in the middle of your scary, unfamiliar dystopia. Or, at least, force them to book a redeye flight and stay at a suspect hotel every time they want to visit you.
And honestly, you really are the fringe idealist here. Look at where you are posting this. Look at how few of us there are. Look at how many hoops you needed to jump through to set up what you have now. I certainly don’t think you’re wrong to champion privacy-focused ideals, but it absolutely is, strictly speaking in a populist context, extremely weird. It is weird to want to understand computerized tech, to know what it actually does, and to make bold, against-the-grain choices based on that knowledge. This is the unfortunate reality, and you have to make your peace with it.
I really do think your option is binary here. Join 'em, or cut 'em. Once you’ve shot your shot to convince someone to be more consciencious of their privacy and to take action to better secure it, and they frustratingly decline, that’s it. They are not coming with you. Further pressing the issue will just drive a wedge between the two of you. At that point, the choice is yours. What’s stronger, your willingness to stay conected, or your principles? Are you so rigidly disciplined that you’re willling to cut ties (at least, through these channels) just to keep it? If so, I guess that’s just a reflection of how much your principles really mean to you. If not, well, it’s SMS/RCS and Google Docs for you.
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I don’t really blame them for not making a switch; I understand their stance/reasoning. It’s just depressing to be the one guy left out, like I don’t get to dance with anyone at the party because I don’t like the music.
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I just don’t worry about it and do my own thing. It’s like veganism lol, it’s not for everyone.
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If someone really cares, they’d jump on the platform I use or they don’t.
What do you do when they feel the same way and don’t understand why you think you’re worth so much extra time and effort to interact with compared to everyone else?
Do you just cut those people out of your life?
If someone wants me to install a service exclusively to speak to them: fuck em, not worth it.
I use basic text messages to contact people, it’s damn near the most universal thing people have when I meet them. I’m not gonna go out of my way to download an app and remember to use it for a specific person when texting exists and everyone else uses it already
This is the argument I typically get from others (though, not as aggressive). I don’t blame this stance at all; it makes sense and is reasonable. I try to extol the benefits of the alternatives I propose but there’s simply no getting past “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitudes.
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Absolutely based. I’m working on it to be like you, man.
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no normalizing overused word plese
You have a product that needs to be sold just as much as google needed to sell gmail. This is where the technical rubber meets the social road. It is a given that not everyone will want to host their services, so to get the network effect people need to use your instance.
With that in mind, first and foremost you should treat your services you host almost like a product: you do need to sell it, it needs to be maintained it, and if other people get onboard you can’t just get bored of it and put it down. Your product is niche and competes with the largest corporate entities out there, but you have the advantage that you can genuinely personally know your customers and your customers can personally and genuinely know you.
I spend considerable thought on this, unless you are talking about household members or other people who trust you borderline absolutely, there is just no way to get a stranger or acquaintance to meaningfully use your hosted services.
For the stuff i host that i can share from my hosted services i make it apparent to the users that the data is subject to my whims. think this helps a little as it puts the otherwise unstated in the open, it would be awkward for a friend to have to ask me how safe their data is, i can acknowledge their data is as safe as their relationship with me is, and honestly that’s the best that can be done without structuring.
Now structuring: if you genuinely want members of your communities to be able to buy in, become consistent and stable with your services operations, a d make a legal entity. Use the entity to provide what you have as a service to have the legal structures in place to protect you and your users. If you think this is bullshit, i don’t recommend because i think the structures will protect anything, i recommend because the structures indicate trustworthiness to the type of people who don’t make themselves concerned with matters they are instructed to not bother with. You would be able to make an appeal to a more personal business relationship.
Now that highlights the effort, as the privacy advocate i functionally have to operate a business to maintain my digital infrastructure; if i want others to join my network i should commit and run a privacy-centric business. There is opportunity here for standard operational models to be documented so that power users can quickly bootstrap and present an adoptable platform to their communities; however, i am not there yet myself.
[Edit: is BEEPER the one Messenger to rule them all? Billed as self-hostable and Open Source, native to Matrix but with integrations to act as front end for What’s App, Signal Telegram, Facebook Messenger, etc… this is looking promising! Anyone have experience? https://www.beeper.com/ ]
Remember the great Instant Messenger schism? (I know, I’m dating myself) Back in the day AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, and MSN Messenger were the top IM platforms, while the IT crowd self-hosted IRC servers. None of these platforms were interoperable, each set up with different protocols in walled gardens. What was the answer for those of us who wanted it all? Third party cross-platform apps that integrated with each major API and provided a unified front-end, with Trillian being the most widely adopted to my knowledge.
WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and all the rest of the single-host messengers are just Instant Messenger platforms wrapped an an App shell with different encryption layers. The answer that we are all craving is a Trillian for the current generation, bundling SMS in with all these other platforms, however as I understand it these service providers no longer offer API access that would allow a third party front end client. The walled gardens no longer have gates, and the enshitification is progressing.
Note that there were official attempts to unify the original IM platforms with interoperability, but to quote wikipedia:
"Most attempts at producing a unified standard for the major IM providers (AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft) have failed, and each continues to use its own proprietary protocol.
However, while discussions at IETF were stalled, Reuters signed the first inter-service provider connectivity agreement in September 2003. This agreement enabled AIM, ICQ and MSN Messenger users to talk with Reuters Messaging counterparts and vice versa. Following this, Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL agreed to a deal in which Microsoft’s Live Communications Server 2005 users would also have the possibility to talk to public instant messaging users. This deal established SIP/SIMPLE as a standard for protocol interoperability and established a connectivity fee for accessing public instant messaging groups or services. Separately, on October 13, 2005, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that by the 3rd quarter of 2006 they would interoperate using SIP/SIMPLE, which was followed, in December 2005, by the AOL and Google strategic partnership deal in which Google Talk users would be able to communicate with AIM and ICQ users provided they have an AIM account[…]
Certain networks have made changes to prevent them from being used by such multi-network IM clients. For example, Trillian had to release several revisions and patches to allow its users to access the MSN, AOL, and Yahoo! networks, after changes were made to these networks. The major IM providers usually cite the need for formal agreements, and security concerns as reasons for making these changes.
The use of proprietary protocols has meant that many instant messaging networks have been incompatible and users have been unable to reach users on other networks.[29] This may have allowed social networking with IM-like features and text messaging an opportunity to gain market share at the expense of IM.[30]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging
History is doomed to repeat itself unless FOSS can win on convenience and UX. One could imagine a big player like Mozilla taking this on and rolling a messenger with an open protocol into their software stack, but that still wouldn’t kill the others due to network effect unless it had some killer app advantage.
Is Beeper the one chat client to rule them all?
Email address and phone number to sign up? I dunno, chief…
Yeah… gave me pause as well. Then again WhatsApp and several of the other services require the same.
I think the deal is if you self host you don’t have to give them anything.
OP pleaee let me know if you find a solution. So far what i host is for me… Matrix bridges are a godsend.
A lot of us here are on the same boat. We don’t know each other but deal with these same issues. We know the truth behind proprietary software and surveillance capitalism and we know that we can only succeed in our efforti if we bring together our loved ones. We need to find the best language and ways to let people know the reality behind the software they use, the dangers of using it, and the marvelous solutions of the free software community. We are a community. Let’s hold ourselves together and keep going. The world may be based in libre software in the future. If it doesn’t, it will be not a good place to live on. But at least we tried. If not for us, for the ones that’ll come in the future.
email covers all my use cases. if they want me, they know how to email me and vice versa. these days its damn instant, attachments are easily managed.
k.i.s.s.
It’s not that big of a deal. You live your life and you let them live theirs. It’s what I’ve done. If they want to continue to use the corporate stuff, that’s on them. Hell, I don’t even harass my wife about it. Just let people be. If it bothers you, go where they are. If it doesn’t, stay here and enjoy what makes this part of the internet great.
That’s easy to say, but it feels to me as if I have to make a choice between engaging and interacting with the people I love or adhering to my beliefs about how I should manage/protect my information. It’s a difficult spot to be in and it’s neither fair that I should have to make that choice nor fair that I should have to force it on others. That’s what’s bothering me.
I’m gonna tell you what you’ve probably been told a million times before. Life ain’t fair. Never has been, never will be. You know it, I know it.
You always have choices to make and each choice bears with it consequences that you must be willing to endure. In the end, you have to decide what’s more important to you. Do you care more about interacting with your loved ones on the internet or your private information?
It’s a loaded question in either direction. Of course my original comment was easy to say and difficult to exact in practice. That’s what it means to have principles you stand for.
Fire and brimstone street corner preaching will get you further than you think. People comply just to shut you up. It’s how I got my family on Signal, Bitwarden, Firefox, and DDG. They are all happier for it and have started a little bit of prosthelytizing themselves. You just have to be willing to stomach straining your relationships in the short-term lol
I love software freedom, federated networks, proper encrytption, and all of that too.
But I’m not kidding myself into thinking that it’s worth losing friends over. Do facebook and IG suck? yeah. But that’s where the social network is. The product isn’t the software, it’s the network.
That’s kind of the point of the fediverse, that we can expand to achieve a large-scale network that creates the same positive network effects as a social network like… well, more like reddit or twitter, primarily due to the norm of anonymity, probably not a replacement for facebook, but…
Anyway… I think that, depending on the specifics, it might actually be a good idea to federate with Threads, just to expand the network, gain mainstream appeal, normalize the fediverse, and drive engagement here.
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I’m at the stage where I’m ready to remove myself from Facebook and other stuff, but I also know just how isolating it will be.
I use the mautrix-whatsapp bridge to bridge whatsapp to matrix. And I just don’t participate in other social media activities.
