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.
Back in the day, I used to try to get everyone to use PGP for their email. Only a couple people did it, even though I would set it all up and provide unlimited tech support.
That’s just how it is.
They know the services, and they’re easy to use. Being the product means that there are SRE teams keeping the services up, and it funds development.
You can’t host your own services and expect everyone else to do the same. You’d be asking the “I hate technology” crowd to learn what to do from the very ground up. As in, a lifetime of experience that they didn’t invest in.
I just don’t worry about it and do my own thing. It’s like veganism lol, it’s not for everyone.
I’m pretty happy that my housemates, family members, and friends are cool with Signal. It’s still centralized, but at least it’s ① end-to-end encrypted, and ② run by a nonprofit that is managed by cool people like Meredith Whittaker and Moxie Marlinspike and seems to have its head on straight.
(It does help that those among our friends who are drug dealers or sex workers were already using Signal. That gave it some credibility when I proposed it as the group chat for my house rather than SMS/MMS, or (ugh!) Facebook Messenger.)
I use the mautrix-whatsapp bridge to bridge whatsapp to matrix. And I just don’t participate in other social media activities.
