Free Internet Non-Believers

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.

CanadaPlus,

Yep. It’s the price you pay for being an early adopter, I guess. At least my family is on WhatsApp now, which is an okay protocol once you lock down the software implementation.

ALostInquirer,

which is an okay protocol once you lock down the software implementation.

What do you mean by this? Adjusting settings and something more…?

CanadaPlus, (edited )

I just have the app in a separate profile right now. Ideally I’d like to run CopperheadOS and have it virtualised or something, but I chose the wrong hardware. I also don’t keep anything very sensitive on my phone is the first place, besides just the data it can passively collect about it’s environment.

The problem with WhatsApp, to be clear, is that the app itself is a closed-source Facebook data hoover. If you stop it from seeing outside data it should be okay. It’s also possible it can be put into a mode where it relays incoming messages after they’re decrypted, but if they ever got caught doing that there’d be a bit of hell to pay, and I can use Wireshark as well as the next guy.

mikwee,

My mom told me if I want to find good internet culture (that I think died), I need to go on Instagram.

slacktoid,
@slacktoid@lemmy.ml avatar

OP pleaee let me know if you find a solution. So far what i host is for me… Matrix bridges are a godsend.

jacktherippah,

I get you. I’m the exact same. Always the weird and paranoid one for being weary of data collection. It is frustrating for sure. So far, no one in my life cares. And I don’t think anyone ever will. It’s sad, really, but that’s how it is. So I just try to do the best I can to maintain my privacy for the threat model that I have and hope that some day somebody else will care.

shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit,

Substitute your beliefs in FOSS etc for god, veganism, Apple, Trump, Biden, your favourite band - and realise that everyone’s on their own journey. Don’t be that guy forcing your beliefs on your friends and family. Or, like you do, find a social group that does share your beliefs. Enjoy them. Enjoy your family and friends.

wewbull,

Unfortunately they are forcing their use of Facebook on him. I don’t force feed vegan friends meet. Don’t force me to give my data to Zuckerberg.

kmaismith,

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.

init,

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.

zecg,
@zecg@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, people don’t give a shit. By boycotting everything I’ve gotten people to install Signal (luckily phones have enough storage now that this is not hard) and that’s good enough for me, we can have group chats.

Cossty, (edited )

I was in a similar situation. Everyone says that you shouldn’t really push too much with these types of things. Once when I was fed up with nobody coming to signal I asked everyone, (even distant family and friends when I saw them), one by one to give me their phone and I installed signal on it, told them to activate it and told them that this is the way to talk to me. If you want to talk to me this is how they do it. It was a little bit weird, but now everybody, almost everybody, I want to talk to is on signal now and they use it to talk to me too.

Some of them I even got to use element/matrix on PC.

NorthWestWind,
@NorthWestWind@lemmy.world avatar

I’m 19 yo, and I proudly announce that I have never been trapped by social media. I’m that one guy who never uses Instagram, and you can only find me through my close friends. I just don’t care about whatever they are doing. Honestly that’s something that has shaped my mental health pretty well.

For communication, it’s unfortunate that everyone uses what everyone uses. My strategy right now, is to wait. Patiently. Waiting for those big platforms to fuck up. You can’t expect anyone to go a different path instantly. Being too pushy about FOSS may disgust them, and backfire.

For example, my dad recently expressed his hate for Google Photos, so I offered him Immich, and he’s happy about it. Now I’m waiting for the opportunity for Matrix.

AVincentInSpace, (edited )

I’ve never been trapped by social media. I never use Instagram, and you can only find me through my close friends.

…he says, on public social media.

Lemmy counts, dude. Idk what to tell you. Just because you don’t have a follower count doesn’t mean it sucks you in any less.

Also I’m a bit skeptical that people will want to adopt the fediverse even when the big platforms DO fuck up. Look at how many people are still on Reddit. Look at how many people saw Twitter melting down in real time and, rather than try to do anything with Mastodon, said “If Elon makes me really mad, I might switch to Threads.” Human inertia is INSANE. Learning how the fediverse works is hard, and doing research to pick an instance is effort. Why would they do that when there’s a perfectly good 1 for 1 Twitter clone right there (which, as a bonus, is built by a billionaire who hates the same billionaire they hate)? And that’s assuming they can bear to leave all the followers and content they’ve amassed behind at all.

Even if that were a non issue, there’s another problem. Libre apps/platforms by and large are not, by ANY usability/feature-completeness metric, better than the competition. My dad, who’s a photographer, recently got fed up with Adobe Lightroom and tried to switch to Linux + Darktable + Rapid Photo Downloader (for ingesting SD cards). Darktable doesn’t have auto color calibration and using the manual tools takes 30 seconds per photo, and Rapid Photo Downloader worked at half the speed Lightroom did. He tried really hard to like it but within a year he ended up biting the bullet and giving Adobe more money.

My dad was one of the developers of HP UNIX. I learned vi from him. He understands the value of open source better than anyone, and he’s no stranger to having to finagle things to get them to work. Open source alternatives couldn’t keep HIM on board.

What do you think my non-technical friends are going to say when I introduce them to Matrix and tell them that there are no modern amenities like stickers, threads, or custom emoji, they have to pair devices manually to get chat logs to sync and even then they sometimes randomly don’t, and none of the mobile clients except the official one support voice calls???

I honestly do not see how we can possibly win this. Frankly, I’m having second thoughts about Matrix.

NorthWestWind,
@NorthWestWind@lemmy.world avatar

I know Lemmy counts as social media, but I can get off at any time I want, unlike some weird people camping their phones for notifications all day.

When big platforms fucked up, there are influx to the Fediverse. Yes, when comparing us to the big platforms, we are still way smaller, but people are moving. We just need to wait patiently. Our job is to announce our existence, but without being pushy about it, because no one likes being forced to do something.

I told my friends about my Matrix instance and bridges, and sent them a screenshot, and that’s it. I also told them if they want to enter the Fediverse, I’ll be their guide. Nothing so far, but I’m waiting.

I should also tell you how I got to the FOSS side of the Internet. It was boredom. I learnt about Linux from my high school teacher talking about it for 30 seconds, and that summer holiday I was bored, so I tried to mess with Linux, and now I’m here.

I believe in us.

wuphysics87,

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

Spectacle8011,
@Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space avatar

I don’t try explaining this stuff anymore. I’m extremely bad at it and I know most people will either not care or not care enough. And that’s fine. It’s easier to let people think I’m a luddite. I prefer to wait for them to ask me why I use technology differently than to preach to them, and most of the time, they don’t ask. It’s always easier to let people convince themselves than to try to convince them.

I tell them to install Signal and message me there, and if they don’t want to do that, they can SMS me. Signal is a better idea if they want faster responses as I rarely check my phone but do check Signal Desktop fairly regularly. I have tried to get KDE Connect working so I can respond to SMS more timely but it was annoying and I gave up.

danhakimi,
@danhakimi@kbin.social avatar

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.

originalucifer,
@originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com avatar

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.

MJBrune,

I’m one of these people. I care about FOSS, privacy by default, open Internet, etc. But I also care about ease of use, using my time wisely, not having to reinvent the wheel or struggling with basic functionality. So I use Windows, Gmail, Google, YouTube, etc. More power to you if you want and have time to make that trade off but after doing it for a decade I’ve decided I lost to much time and energy to the alternatives and my data has gotten stolen anyways. It’s not a winnable fight in my mind. I’ll support and release my software for Linux but I won’t waste my time anymore.

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