> Nowadays, to the average person I probably look like a technology curmudgeon
Nowadays, most discussion & thoughts about tech are far more ambivalent & concerned than they used to be. What hope & optimism there is often feels shallow & vapid. Doubt & questions & concerns seem well justified & rampant. Few individuals seem like they are a driver seat- it feels like tech is steering it's own ship and the "where do you want to go" idea, the personal computing idea, is way way way way outmoded & most tech is now us, in the hands of far greater powers that shape what tech will be.
I adore Nolan's writing & thoughts, but to cast himself as an outsider & cantankerous & a crank is not how I read the tea-leaves of society today.
There's very little shiny promising & exciting on the horizon. What progressive technology camps there are tend to have their faith in weird cult-like high high high tech AI, Blockchain, Quantum or other deeply beyond mortal reach technologies. Most mainstream tech has had a shadow but that underbelly's visibility has grown greatly & dissatisfaction & untrustability- conservative, fear based minsets- have quite justifiably exploded in adoption. Almost no where is there a practical progressive view of technology as a can-do adaptable system that we all can use to shape & guide ourselves, our lives, our way of communicating, and our way of thinking.
I for one have unbounded optimism, but it's because I think it would be very easy to start doing for ourselves. I think our assessments are quite real, quite good, I think we understand how dastardly so many of the traps we've fell into are, begun to deeply comprehend the dangers of superficial low-agency software systems & "creator" economics. We're getting enormously better at information tech, even though we're still not using it for anything remotely empowering or good. But some day we'll start to, and we'll get better fast at personal computing, once we start to see & realize what progressive, positive computing basis could possibly look like.
Thank you. I really relate to the original post. Like the author, I am spending way too much time getting lineage to work on my phone while trying to run an ecosystem of self hosted services for my community that fewer and fewer folks seem to want, even as they complain about the role of big tech in their lives and culture.
I really appreciate the sense of maybe-I'm-not-totally-alone that your post conveys. Maybe the author would as well? "There are literally dozens of us".
Thanks for this. Having been a bit deflated by the state of tech, but this post has reinvigorated my optimism. Is there somewhere I can read more of your thoughts? And do you know of any forums or groups for tech optimists building the future?
One of the closest held set of beliefs that I hold is that software is empowering when it is malleable, adaptive, not fixed in nature, when it is observable & it's mechanisms are deeply learnable. A lot of these values are mirrored to me in Ursala Franklin's dichotomy of technology as either Holistic or Prescriptive, as tools that empower & enrich the user, or tech/tools that dictate & govern[1].
It's still a small & young community but these many principles line up very closely, are espoused by, in my mind, the Malleable Systems Collective[2]. I don't have a strong presence right now on the web but thank you, and I do want to be better gathering & gardening the digital aspects of my self online.
I kinda bounce back and forth between feeling like a tech curmudgeon, and freshly optimistic of the future...among some things that make me look forward to the future include:
* computer makers who focus on either linux or "fix it yourself" audience...like system&6, Pine64, and the newest Framework (laptop empowering DIY...though they sell it with Windows they mention adding formal linux support later)
* also more decentralized communications and networks...like the matrix protocol (and associated distrib. network) along with apps like Element, nheko, fluffychat, etc.), the Briar project, the fediverse (and all its apps and instances like mastodon, pleroma, pixlfed, etc.), and on and on.
* finally, there are more and more headlines related to privacy and controlling one's own devices...which continue to become mainstream. While i'm not expecting to have the big corps change overnight...but capitalism being what it is, at some point these big corps will start to adjust their offerings even if only a little to fill the needs that the layperson consumers are beginning to ask/talk about. Sure, plenty is still fluf - like Apple's supposed marketing around privacy...but that shows that at least Apple and other firms are listening to the signals being eminated that privacy - as only one example - is now a selling feature...i'll defer to the reader if Apple has actuaklly achieved anything here...but the fact that it is a topic that has come up in the mainstream enough for Apple to use it as marketing means that there's something to this...which means that some other big corp or med-sized corp might grab that and run to make services and products that cater to the crowds who favor privacy, control, etc.
...at least that what i'm feeling this morning...fingers crossed that my raspberry pi doesn't stop working because another sdcard has failed. ;-)
Great list. One thing I want to reinforce is that the leading edge engineers of the world are only just starting to surface wide-scale, acceptable, happy practices for running systems/software. It's only in the past couple years that "build a cluster of raspberry pi's" has become a "legible"/comprehensible pitch, something that makes a light bulb go off over people's heads. A couple years ago we wouldn't really have known what to think, what that would be good for.
But now we have the shared language, the operational tools (& culture) to imagine clusters of computing resources coming together, reinforcing & helping one another, providing reliability & stable known operating environments for a vast variety of "easy" to launch workloads. To the point that a hobbyist can bring up a pi cluster mini-data-center in less than a weekend. That's draw dropping amazing, & a colossal demonstration of how much mastery we've achieved over such a wide wide set of concerns. 5 years ago we didn't even have the shared language to express the goal/desire, the cloud was abstract, but now it's real & something we can do for $120 and a couple hours. And we'll only get better. We're only really just getting started with this inertia, only just started bringing a lot of big ideas into the commons. While the primary drivers are big & medium entities doing ops, this is a huge foothold for the home, for the hobbyist to get going with, to make running software simple but not too simple, to have a platform that scales from very low & easy to very big & fancy. There's a lot of epic & amazing home-cloud stuff going on, & this is all so new, & very technical, but over time I expect a lot of paths to be paved, a lot of lessons learned, and the amazing ultra-leading-edge works like onedr0p's homecloud[1] to spring into bloom & to seed new efforts. Having a rich, high-potential ecosystem that computing & the computing community can build atop of & get good & get more elegant with is a precondition for any other part of computing succeeding. Without good ops, personal computing can go nowhere, and we are so so so much better gathered & doing so much better than we were even half a decade ago.
Once our own computing becomes possible, the spread of p2p & distributed systems might start. Even that doesn't seem ultra-necessary to me. I believe the mediums we have are enormously powerful, enormously flexible, and incredibly distributed if put to use for those ends. Specs like ActivityPub and ActivityStreams can remake how almost all software works, can provide the fabric of connectivity that makes connected networked systems so compelling, so interesting to participate in, without the top-down-control, with self-determinism & agency & genuine ownership of data. That we can have amazing new online vantage points for these wide & diverse feeds of information when we harken to protocols & feeds.
Still missing right now, mobile/low power systems are still trapped in the old world: the most important device we own, our phones, can not participate in the new dawning better-ops cross-system-ops galaxy we are breathing life into. Unlocking mobile from the confines of narrow consumerdom is a long battle, and I mostly hope the overwhelming brilliance of self-hosting Linux makes Linux on the phone too compelling to allow these consumer,
This guy is me, I have pretty much the same setup.
I hate the latest wave of smart stuff, as it all seems mostly user-hostile.
But even without the latest internet connected, google/alexa integration etc, the microcontrollers in devices have been abused to inflict terrible UI's on users for a long time now.
We need a 'unix philosophy' for household appliances and gadgets. Do one thing, well. Facilitate composition.
For example, I want to switch some floor fans (PSC motors) to much more efficient BLDC versions. They all seem to come with LED or LCD displays, timers, remotes, etc, some even integrate with alexa ... No Thanks! I just want more-efficient and quieter fans, perhaps with potentiometer, or at least, much finer-grained speed control as an upgrade over the 3 fixed speeds I have now, which is inherently possible due to BLDC controller. Perhaps an SPI interface so I can add my own smarts if I want to.
This really resonates with me. I haven't gone so far as to run LineageOS (because I want to be able to use Lyft, Google Pay, etc.), but I do some of this stuff. I have a Raspberry Pi controlling all my smart home hardware, with the internet-connected bit running on a server I control. My TV is from 2007 even though I'd really like a larger, better, higher-resolution TV, because I don't want a TV that tries to connect to the internet. I run Linux as my daily driver because I don't want Windows tracking everything I do and popping up ads in the start menu, and don't like Apple's trend toward locking down their OSes to the point where it's not even my hardware anymore.
I would love to get Google out of my life, but Google Photos is easily my favorite phone app, and I still get a lot of value out of GDocs, GDrive, etc., and managing a Nextcloud instance sounds like more work than I want to do.
I do feel like I have an antagonistic relationship with technology, and as someone who works in technology, that makes me really sad.
I'm reminded that, in the mid-90s, one of Microsoft's branding slogans was "where do you want to go today?" While that seems funny in retrospect, back then MS's software really did let you do more or less whatever you wanted. These days our platforms are becoming more and more locked down, and meanwhile they're actively leaking our personal information to third parties who are the poorest stewards of it imaginable.
I want to be optimistic for the future of technology, but it's really hard to be.
Wow, that "where do you want to go today" really tripped a strong nostalgia vein and reminded me of the old Microsoft Interactive CD Sampler: https://youtu.be/FrD78hULKIQ?t=234
Today the slogan for all big Americans tech companies is more like "we are going in this direction and you are probably dumb enough to just agree with our terms".
I think that is a little unfair. The tech companies still do some stuff that provides value to people and usually for free. Additionally, grandma isn't going to be rooting phones and installing toolchains and managing their own hardware and OS. Making tech trivial to use and "just work" at scale is hard. Doing it all for free is even harder.
And the problem with that is most users have definitively and repeatedly voted with their wallets that they would rather give up privacy and freedoms than pay money. The vast majority of consumers simply don't care, and the HN audience are outliers.
Right but freedom is never free. It is free if users think it is free. Companies use lots of chemicals that are unhealthy in/on/around all our food (even "organic") but growing all your own food is untenable, unless we revert to agrarian societies.
No, the real problem is creators/stewards in technology (e.g. most of the people here) are dumb and oblivious enough to sign on to the idea that "average joe, who must use a baseline of our particular mix of technologies to merely get by in this world, is fully and completely consenting to the entire range of whatever those huge companies dictate because a wall of text flashed by them when they turned the thing on."
This notion is UTTER B.S. and needs to die quickly, and it is wholly unfair to put this on the users and not the creators and big companies.
(Yes, I am lawyer, and it is absolutely immoral to abuse our notions of contract law in this fashion. Gives the whole system a very bad name.)
GDPR tried to do that, and the governments charged to enforce it decided to not enforce it. It is one of the primary reason why there are people saying that only a few single digit percent of websites actually comply with GDPR, and why consent popup that most sites use do not actually conform to the law.
For sure. I was still glad to see it though; I think there's a lot of pressure for laws and policies to be exact, but honestly, in the very-quickly-moving world of tech, we should actually -- ha, fail early and often, even when it comes to policy.
How do you feel about software licensing, then? GPL and BSD licenses are certainly too long and heady for the "average joe" to understand when installing software, yet they're an essential part of software freedom. Are they also being exploitative, since they're subjecting the user to conditions they're unaware of?
IANL but just installing and using GPL software is not subjecting the user to any exploitative conditions. Only if the user tries to create a derivative work (linking) and redistribute that.
I’m curious, what’s so great about Google photos? I’m on iCloud photos but looking to move away from it in the near future in protest of the recent infringement by Apple
> I’m curious, what’s so great about Google photos? I’m on iCloud photos but looking to move away from it in the near future in protest of the recent infringement by Apple
Assuming you're protesting CSAM detection, you should know that Google has been doing this forever.
FWIW, generally proprietary apps will work just fine with LineageOS and Play services. Where things get nonstandard is using LineageOS + microG. The former still has most of Google's built in surveillance, but the advantage it brings is a consistent interface between devices.
No idea specifically about Google Pay though, like if it demands a proprietary device for "security". I personally don't see the appeal of new forms of surveilled payments - the plastic cards in my wallet work just fine for that.
Also I can't say this enough - if you're apprehensive about trying out LOS or LOS+microG, get a second device. It only runs on certain devices anyway, so most likely you'll be buying used for $100-$200. You don't have to take a leap all at once - rather you can try different apps gradually.
(Although at this point I hope Pinephone is gaining on LOS. You might consider focusing your attention there, even though it's much less ready for prime time from what I understand)
> managing a Nextcloud instance sounds like more work than I want to do.
there are multiple hosted options where you don't have to manage the server - instead, you'll get admin access to your nextcloud, you can add accounts for Family members or freelancers whenever needed and it mostly "just works". When using a Nextcloud client, the only additional step that is needee compared to Dropbox etc is providing the server URL.
I tinker with some of this stuff, but almost never deploy it to production. The author, and others who practice this sort of purism, clearly have the luxury of time to dedicate to the hobby. And that’s great. But I have two kids and a wife who works online (as do I) and I just need shit to work otherwise the house doesn’t run and I don’t ever get to have whole days to myself to fiddle about with Nextcloud or whatever.
I have recently started to run pi-hole as I was appalled my the sheer number of awful in-app ads on my TV and my kids’ tablets. It’s messed a few things up but the trade off seems worth it for me.
I like to think that most of the open-source/free software solutions the author mentions aren't _that_ bad. I've run a pi-hole and barely noticed it. Raspberry Pi or old Arch Linux laptop as a NAS? Worked for me and required basically no maintenance. PC connected to a projector/TV? Easier learning curve for me as it's "just" a PC and will do everything that a PC can do such as effortless playback of subtitled media, low latency twitch tv, playback from NAS, etc...) A slightly involved network setup (discrete router, access points, etc.)? Basically pain-free and if one device kicks the bucket replacing a single component is no big deal.
The one exception is the phone. Phones are a wonder (disaster?) of vertical integration and if you're outside one of the two walled gardens it's like living on another planet. Ride-hailing apps, games, dating-apps, even SMS! can be unsupported or flaky on the analogous open alternatives. After the recent Apple announcement I ordered a Pinephone but I'm not expecting much more than a toy.
Accordingly, you can do most of the above and have it fly under the radar when having guests over, but the moment you whip out the non *droid/iOS phone around friends you've outed yourself.
I think he had a point, some OSS software is objectively just bad - UX, UI, bugs, overly complicated. That’s not me trying to personally attack them it’s that just so many seem to lack any kind of QA - some bugs I’ve encountered are reproducible almost immediately with using the program.
Basic integration of all these solutions often ends up with a less satisfactory solution than a “commercial”/closed source version.
I’m sure some naysayers will come up with platitudes like “no funding makes it more difficult” and “well it’s open source just fix it”.
For the first one, like I said some of the bugs or cumbersome problems are not even difficult to reproduce. Basic pointing and clicking by the devs would find it.
For the second, come on, they can’t just misdirect all their users with “fix it yourself” - we might not know how, might not know the language or framework, or simply might not want to spend the time trying to figure out some tedious workflow involving self hosted Git repos or some poorly documented spaghetti build process. At the end of the day the devs themselves are in the best position to fix.
>I think he had a point, some OSS software is objectively just bad - UX, UI, bugs, overly complicated.
A lot of the closed-source software is also quite bad, but in a wholly different way: Sure, the UI is clean and the software is not complicated per se, but often your ability to simply retrieve information has been intentionally degraded in favor of an algorithmic discovery queue. The UI, while simple enough, changes for no good reason far too often. Often these UI changes are seemingly for the worse, so I can only guess that they improve "engagement." And of course, although the application may be simple to use, it's often built with "dark patterns," which are meant to shape your behavior. Yes, you can ignore or overcome these, but it's a hurdle which should never exist in the first place.
By contrast, I don't think anyone loves Rhythmbox, (the open source itunes clone) but I've been using it for a decade and the UI has not appreciably changed at all. The application is definitely not perfect, but I can at least work around its flaws because those flaws are consistent. And really, why would a file-based music player need to change its UI much at all? There are no dark patterns to speak of, it's not trying to addict me into consuming more content, or paying for some subscription service.
Unfortunately, at this point, it's just the price you have to pay for software freedom.
You're underestimating the difficulty of fixing bugs, even if they are "not difficult to reproduce". Most FOSS devs are doing all this work for free and most of the time the only feedback they get is "you're UI, UX is broken/bad". What incentive do they have to spend days of their free time optimizing the UX?
If they actually care about the project then the incentive is already there to make sure all of it works - not just everything apart from the UX/UI - this attitude is exactly why it's all broken.
To state something you probably already know: The goal of FOSS is freedom to view and change the code. It makes no guarantees about quality or usability. Despite that, a lot of FOSS software is of great quality. But it's not the goal.
There is nothing to say that a company must derive their revenues from a single source. It has always been like that, or at least it has been like that for a very long time. Newspapers derive their revenue from both sales to readers and sales of advertising. If you subscribe, they also sell the subscriber data. The same thing can be said of warranty cards. You don't see them as much these days since it turns out to be far more reliable to force people to register their product when they first turn it on, but it was always a way to get marketing (and marketable) data.
I don't see it happening. FOSS either forms companies and plays the same PR game as everyone else, or we'll be stuck in the same aftermarket-nothing-working-correctly feeling OP is getting burnt out on. This is why I think the Fairphone, eSolutions, Librem, the Pine gadgeds matter so much, because they are the step in the right direction: packaging the marketing and an OOTB solution, but built the Right Way.
The problem with 90% of the free, open soure technology is the lack of a decent User Interface. Want to make a change in the way it works? Dig through the config file to find the one setting you need, or query the DB to tweak that one little thing.
The day something like a pi-hole can be installed as easily as a sim card, and can be left alone running without having to interact with it via the terminal will be the day open source software would have gotten mainstream coverage (No, Linux is not mainstream, unless you consider Android)
I see your point and I'm not contradicting you, but I do feel that this expectation of comfort is the main hook that locked down technology is using to get us. Once we're used to it we don't easily give it up. But I think it leads to passivity. And once everything is catered to the lowest common denominator, it starts to get in the way of any usage out of the ordinary.
Doesn't this also point the way to how FLOSS can win? Go ahead and have a config file with options for everything, but out-of-the-box everything should work, be smooth, attractive, and a joy to use. Create a more comfortable environment than the commercial options. Actually cater to the lowest common denominator.
I agree that this is the way. Fairphone, Pine, Librem, etc all try to provide their things along these lines. It would be great if we could make FOSS more profitable.
The expectation of comfort is why anyone pays for a service-and why people make them. What would you choose to do? Build all your furniture on your own, or get it built by a machine and pay for it?
That being said, I do feel that it does lead to passivity, particularly when there is a single dominant player in the market. Case in point: Office before GSuite.
It's a matter of definition, but I feel technology can do more than just make our lives more comfy. Anyway my point is that the chase for comfort can actually hurt us. Maybe we should try some carpentry?
The whole point of technology is to improve our lives. What you call ‘comfort’, I call the entire point of the thing. If it takes more work to get a piece of technology to do what you want than it takes to do the thing without technology, why use it?
I would love to start a small business selling pre-configured Pis with an external SSD and the basics of a self-hosted setup (Nextcloud, Bitwarden, Mastodon, hopefully Matrix once Dendrite is production-ready) along with a basic auto-renewable domain subscription. There _might_ be enough people concerned about the security of their nude pictures and the censorship/disinformation practices of FB/Twitter that they'd be willing to pay $150 + $10/year in order to have a turnkey 'your personal, private cloud' product.
Two issues I wouldn't know how to solve are:
(1) backups - not having backups for your personal data would be utterly irresponsible, but adding an E2E encrypted cloud backup to the package would come with substantial recurring costs
(2) public Internet access - from what I understand very few Internet providers will allow you to just run a publicly-accessible webserver from your home router, and for a lot of people it's going to be a bad idea due to having a crap router and horribly unsecured devices on their local LAN. You would have to add a cloud-hosted bastion server, which could be super small and cheap, sure, but it's still a monthly cost and now your 'personal cloud' is reliant on Hetzner or whomever, killing the product's sales pitch
I run a Mastodon. It’s not very good at de-duplicating media. Your SSD will quickly be filled up with a thousand copies of reposted memes if you do not configure it to aggressively prune remote media.
I've been trying to get back in, too, but its very hard to find a company that isn't doing bad things, and you're compensated for the degree to which you make those things worse.
It makes you want to cry, but it's honestly killing me. I hope you picked a job that forces you into the fewest ethical dilemmas and treats you well.
> If you want to live in the eighteenth century so bad, why don’t you get a horse and buggy while you’re at it?
As someone who lives in the country, who does share our back country roads with horses and buggies as well as cars, trucks, and farm equipment... our local community works just fine with many different people making different choices about how much technology they choose to bring into their homes.
I believe thinking about such questions and making your own decisions is an extremely healthy habit, no matter where your final decisions fall.
Tinkering with free software is not necessarily a hobby. You are actually learning from it a lot about technology. This understanding and skills (fixing problems, debugging, patience, reading docs) can be converted to money.
I am on the same path but I don't see it as a problem.
I see it as a realistic mindset and mandatory skills for the future. Peer pressure must be ignored delicately.
Somehow I envision decentralized future in which people will use bootstrapped and FOSS software on small private networks. In my country, before big internet centralization there were small internet providers who offered all kinds of information services. When this time comes, some will be prepared to lead the way. And some will follow, as always.
I have 3 years old degoogled Lineage phone, because you can't really buy new phone with good camera and normal size, I am using phones without gapps since I lived in China and not really missing Google apps, onyl Google apps in my phone are GBoard (with no internet access) and GTRanslate which I don't really use
I'm running 10 year old thinkpad with SSD and more RAM and hooked external dispaly/mouse/kbd
I don't use features of my smart TV, because smart TCL was unbearably dumb, coudln't sideload anything, didn't have app store, so I bought Android TV stick (some cheap Xiaomi for 40USD) just so my kids can watch Youtube (dummy account, not that I woud use Google services anyway even on computer) since the one built in was constantly freezing and when they were away for vacation I enjoyed playing old games through emulators with gamepad
I have camera in kid's room, so I can check them in night, while watching torrented TV shows/movies from USB flashdrive plugged in my TV in living room (I've had Netflix for year and only thing I used it for was show Peppa pig to kids, still rather downloaded all my stuff through USB stick or hooked laptop with HDMI cable)
besides these, no smart devices in my household, no speakers, kids not using phones or tablets at all, while older is starting primary school, though they read a lot books, play with real toys and draw, not sure when I will introduce them to phones, not rushing
only social networks I use are Twitter and Reddit, ofc not with real name, I'm not backing up my photos anywhere online, only physical backups
But still eats genetically modified food, uses airplanes and electric vehicles, his home is (probably powered by the utility grid) and uses the internet to work.
I hate how technology only relates to his personal computer
One recent thing happened here that makes me sympathetic to this attitude. A few years back I bought an older mac mini to build iphone apps on. Wasn't fancy, was 2nd hand but it did the job. Then Apple decided they wouldn't release OS updates for it. Then because of that, it suddenly got impossible to install pretty much anything. I usually develop in .net, but that no longer is supported, and won't run. So Apple turned the thing into a shiny brick effectively. A company with billions of cash idling in the bank won't support older hardware? They could literally afford to do it until the sun explodes.
At this point, they are just giving people the finger simply for the hell of it. I'll bet debian will run on there and I won't ever buy another mac.
I still use a Mac Mini from 2009 as my main computer although I have upgraded the hard drive to a solid state disk and expanded the memory from 2 GB to (maximum) 8 GB. I run Debian on it with the window manager Blackbox. Other World Computing has great upgrade instruction videos for all models.
Of all the complaints you could have about Apple, supporting software updates on legacy devices isn't really one. The iPhone 6s which was released in 2015 will receive this years iOS 15 release. The 2014 Mac mini will support the upcoming macOS release. My Apple devices tend to be usable at least 2-3x as long as similar devices from other manufacturers.
I know it's a bit much to single out Apple on this, I have older hardware from other manufacturers that will never run Windows 10 and Windows 11 won't run on some current Microsoft hardware. But Apple don't have that much hardware to support, it's not like they have thousands of variations of mac minis. I find it frustrating that the decision to make this machine unuseable was a reminder that a company like Apple is really in charge, not the owner of the device.
Its like the razor companies always changing the cartridge formats so your razor handle becomes useless and you're forced to buy a new one or go back to safety razors. Its the waste that bothers me most.
I am back to safety razors for shaving and Linux is the closest equivalent.
The machine isn't really usable with the current OSes, being dog slow at everything.
But you do bring up an interesting point. I have had the same issues with Windows on older hardware.
Which makes me wonder why hardware with 2.5-3GhZ CPUs and SSDs is not enough to run a current version of an OS even with 4-6 GB of RAM.
Probably the same reason for both companies: at some point doing regression testing encompassing a decade or more of old hardware becomes untenable.
Developers are always happy when they can deprecate old systems because their new code can assume the shiny new fast hardware and full-featured API of the new OS.
Newer CPUs have hardware for AES decryption and other such stuff. Hardware can do it about 100x faster than software. OS manufacturers have spread "security" all through their stack.
Dude, you need to chillax. I too have a love-hate affair with technology, but I choose the walled garden to get everything working seamless for everyone. It's a brave new world, and a way to cope is to embrace it with warts and all. In order to improve on what is not working you need to feel the pain.
It is pain. I'm not saying it is brave. It is a reflection on reality. You cannot improve if you don't exist on the same level of existence as everyone else. Avoiding the pain is just equal to sticking your head in the ground and trying to get everyone else to do the same.
I was like this for a bit, kinda loosing touch / interest in the latest fancy whatever. I used to get excited about new tvs, phones, whatever I could make an impulse purchase on and satisfy a need for a moment.
Still watch WWDC and other Apple keynotes but meh... I am excited about the new M chips. Had an M1 Macbook Pro until I quit that job and had to turn it in lol. It was hands down amazing / best Apple laptop experience I've had in a long time. Holding out for the next chip revision until I get a new personal one.
What excites me now - I've gotten pretty heavily into 3d printing. Have 2 printers working side by side now (thinking about a 3rd) Started out as just something to print random crap for around the house - under cabinet coffee mug holder, wall hooks, pen holder, etc... Now, I've gotten into (back into) RC cars and robotics - finishing up a motorized Wall-E Replica and an F1 RC car (based on OpenRC). I plan to design my own RC car soon. Have designed some of my own parts and am thinking about getting into production / trying to sell some stuff on Etsy or whatever.
Will it evolve into a career change of some sort? Not sure. But the path I'm going down is similar to how I got into web development; casual at first, then got an entry level job and been doing it for 20 years now. After 20 years, web development is blah. Constantly chasing the next best JS framework; trying to 1up the next candidate looking for the same job to stay relevant. Just getting exhausting.
God, I could have written most of this post myself. I made a few different tech choices - bought a projector instead of trying to un-smart a smart TV, and my ISP thankfully provides me with a static IP for free so I can easily access my Pi over the internet. But the core self-hosting and privacy tools are the same - LineageOS, Nextcloud, F-Droid, Pi server, Linux desktop. Same cursing when Nextcloud slows down or raises nonexisting conflicts. Same confusion/annoyance from my friends or dates when I send them a slow self-hosted link instead of just sharing via Whatsapp. Same asking myself why am I doing all of this, as I am no dangerous dissident or whistleblower (yet!).
One big difference between me and Mr. Lawson is that I'm not entirely opposed to running hostile apps. I do use WhatsApp because I live in Western Europe where not doing so would, sadly, cut me off from 90% of social life. I still use Google Maps because I need business contact / opening hours / restaurant menu information far more than I do accurate GPS navigation (but I would freeze it and whip out OSMAnd+ if I needed to navigate to my local dissident society meetup). And I use GBoard because it's just smoother than Anysoft or Floris or other OSS keyboards.
However, I consider them hostile apps so while I choose to run them, I don't want to let them run unrestricted; I sandbox them as much as possible. GBoard has no internet access, period; neither does Google Translate (after downloading the language files I cared about). My phone doesn't have a built-in Google Account, so Google Maps runs in anonymous mode (I send bookmarks to Joplin); it constantly brings up a popup complaining that it can't run without Play Services, but immediately proves itself a liar by running perfectly anyway.
For other apps, TrackerControl forbids them from connecting to any domain I don't explicitly allow. Insular prevents them from accessing my local data. Thankfully, the only data-hoovering apps that I need to janitor in such a way are WhatsApp and Tinder; everything else either has a FOSS client, or runs as a webapp (my browser, of course, has an extensive and very very clunky suite of privacy addons).
Most importantly, I have a simple rule of not doing or writing anything on WhatsApp that I would be embarrassed to see plastered on a billboard in front of my house - thankfully that encompasses 99% of my everyday life. For the remaining 1% of content, I find people are more understanding when I tell them 'mind if we discuss this over a phone call or Signal?'.
One last thing, since I mentioned the TrackerControl app - although I try not to be a tech vegan and simply say that I have a passion for tinkering and a bit of a paranoid streak, I've found most people's eyes to light up a little up when I open TC and show them how a random innocuous app is connecting to a half-dozen different social media websites. It's not enough to convert anyone - and I wouldn't try anyway, given how cumbersome even a plain LineageOS installation is to maintain - but it does give them pause, and they at least claim to understand why I may care about this stuff.
> My wife complains that none of the devices in our house work, and she’s right
This hasn't been my experience at all. I find my devices often work much better than my peers' devices. Just yesterday, I blew someone's mind by being able to unzip a password protected zip and open a password protected pdf with my phone. They had been sending people documents like this for years and never saw anyone open it with their phone. Open source software is often more powerful than the mainstream alternatives, and the algorithms are easier to control, rather than be controlled by. Yes, it takes a bit of knowhow and work to configure things and get them running smoothly. But even the discipline itself has benefits. My guiding principle in all this is "Program or be programmed".
This encapsulates something the article misses: those with technical know-how can typically still thrive with others while living a tech-ascetic lifestyle, but the facade is broken as soon as non-technical friends and family come into the picture.
My most-used means of file transfer is "e-mailed zip file", and generally this works well - until, of course, someone can't open a zip file on their phone. Which I'd assume is most phone users. The phone doesn't need an unzip utility, because a phone user expects a link to some cloud service (Google Photos, etc.) to achieve the same thing. The content doesn't live on the device; it's just a dumb terminal.
Taken to its extreme, I recently had to downmix several HD videos taken on a phone onto a DVD, and _physically mail it overseas_, because even the cloud option wasn't open to the user.
> The thing that has always bothered me about this, and which continues to bother me, is that I’m only able to live this lifestyle because I have the technical know-how. The average person would neither know how to do any of the things I’m doing (installing a custom Android ROM, setting up Nextcloud, etc.), nor would they probably want to, given that it’s a lot of extra hassle for a sub-par experience.
I'm deep into "I know how to do this stuff, or could work it out, but I really cannot be bothered and will put up with the mostly-adequate experience so long as someone else manages it".
I used to run my own mail server. Heck, I used to lease out shell accounts and run email for other people. But gmail is just better at dealing with spam, probably because they manage a huge fraction of all email.
I still have the 20-year old email address, ticking over, delivering mail into a shell account run by someone else. It's about 50% spam, 49% things I've not bothered to unsubscribe from, and 1% really important stuff from long-dormant sources that I'd forgotten about. And of course it's there if I need to go back for whatever reason.
Back in 90s, I was trying to send a game to a friend via dialup.
After 3 hours of failed attempts I gave up and walked a floppy disk 2 miles to his house.
I put a fair bit of work into making the foss tech things in my house _just work_.
For instance, I run a tablet on my kitchen counter with the homeassistant interface. It displays photos when not in use.
My piHole setup (multiple of them for redundancy) can be paused from the homeassistant dashboard.
There's a different dashboard for access to Plex or other web UIs. Everything runs behind a reverse proxy with pretty URLs and authentication is from a single source usually.
The one bit of magic is the vpn for when you're out of the house. So it goes.
I'm curious how you implemented the VPN for when you're out of the house. I'd like to have an always on VPN, but too many sites I need to access block VPNs.
> I blew someone's mind by being able to unzip a password protected zip and open a password protected pdf with my phone.
Yes but can you make a phone call? Have you ever tried to make a phone call on your cell phone and it did not work? I have, on multiple occasions. I cannot say the same thing for a land line.
> Just yesterday, I blew someone's mind by being able to unzip a password protected zip and open a password protected pdf with my phone.
Are you saying iOS and Android can’t do those things? Because they definitely can — the reason they never saw anyone do it is probably because most people wouldn’t bother trying.
I'm on the same path. I even faced very similar problems. To avoid software failures, I keep two different browsers and two for mapping, OsmAnd and Organic Maps. And to not bother others in my household, I implement the measures only for myself, so no things like the PiHole. These both reduce friction and bring peace of mind.
Did I have a long-lost twin separated at birth? It's good to know I'm not alone, at least. Some of my own specific choices are a bit different, but this could have been me writing it.
What's it going to take to get technology that actually respects BOTH privacy and freedom?
I've gone back and forth with this mindset myself, swinging between "privacy all the things!" and "I can't win what's the point". I think I've reached a happy medium where rather than larping as Edward Snowden I'm larping as a privacy-conscious sysadmin. And I've managed to not annoy my wife too much along the way, which is a nice plus. In fact, she gets more annoyed now when she accidentally connects to the non-pi-hole'd guest network and all the ads reappear on her tablet.
I like to make sure all the apps on my phone are setup the way I like. Ban most from running in background, disallow from accessing services especially in the background. Adblocking services, etc. I use my phone alot for work, so rocking some custom OS in not an option.
Firewall rules, use of many networks & vlans, and different ssids for different type of wifi traffic. Make for a secure home.
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[ 157 ms ] story [ 2272 ms ] threadNowadays, most discussion & thoughts about tech are far more ambivalent & concerned than they used to be. What hope & optimism there is often feels shallow & vapid. Doubt & questions & concerns seem well justified & rampant. Few individuals seem like they are a driver seat- it feels like tech is steering it's own ship and the "where do you want to go" idea, the personal computing idea, is way way way way outmoded & most tech is now us, in the hands of far greater powers that shape what tech will be.
I adore Nolan's writing & thoughts, but to cast himself as an outsider & cantankerous & a crank is not how I read the tea-leaves of society today.
There's very little shiny promising & exciting on the horizon. What progressive technology camps there are tend to have their faith in weird cult-like high high high tech AI, Blockchain, Quantum or other deeply beyond mortal reach technologies. Most mainstream tech has had a shadow but that underbelly's visibility has grown greatly & dissatisfaction & untrustability- conservative, fear based minsets- have quite justifiably exploded in adoption. Almost no where is there a practical progressive view of technology as a can-do adaptable system that we all can use to shape & guide ourselves, our lives, our way of communicating, and our way of thinking.
I for one have unbounded optimism, but it's because I think it would be very easy to start doing for ourselves. I think our assessments are quite real, quite good, I think we understand how dastardly so many of the traps we've fell into are, begun to deeply comprehend the dangers of superficial low-agency software systems & "creator" economics. We're getting enormously better at information tech, even though we're still not using it for anything remotely empowering or good. But some day we'll start to, and we'll get better fast at personal computing, once we start to see & realize what progressive, positive computing basis could possibly look like.
I really appreciate the sense of maybe-I'm-not-totally-alone that your post conveys. Maybe the author would as well? "There are literally dozens of us".
It's still a small & young community but these many principles line up very closely, are espoused by, in my mind, the Malleable Systems Collective[2]. I don't have a strong presence right now on the web but thank you, and I do want to be better gathering & gardening the digital aspects of my self online.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
[2] https://malleable.systems/
* computer makers who focus on either linux or "fix it yourself" audience...like system&6, Pine64, and the newest Framework (laptop empowering DIY...though they sell it with Windows they mention adding formal linux support later)
* also more decentralized communications and networks...like the matrix protocol (and associated distrib. network) along with apps like Element, nheko, fluffychat, etc.), the Briar project, the fediverse (and all its apps and instances like mastodon, pleroma, pixlfed, etc.), and on and on.
* finally, there are more and more headlines related to privacy and controlling one's own devices...which continue to become mainstream. While i'm not expecting to have the big corps change overnight...but capitalism being what it is, at some point these big corps will start to adjust their offerings even if only a little to fill the needs that the layperson consumers are beginning to ask/talk about. Sure, plenty is still fluf - like Apple's supposed marketing around privacy...but that shows that at least Apple and other firms are listening to the signals being eminated that privacy - as only one example - is now a selling feature...i'll defer to the reader if Apple has actuaklly achieved anything here...but the fact that it is a topic that has come up in the mainstream enough for Apple to use it as marketing means that there's something to this...which means that some other big corp or med-sized corp might grab that and run to make services and products that cater to the crowds who favor privacy, control, etc.
...at least that what i'm feeling this morning...fingers crossed that my raspberry pi doesn't stop working because another sdcard has failed. ;-)
But now we have the shared language, the operational tools (& culture) to imagine clusters of computing resources coming together, reinforcing & helping one another, providing reliability & stable known operating environments for a vast variety of "easy" to launch workloads. To the point that a hobbyist can bring up a pi cluster mini-data-center in less than a weekend. That's draw dropping amazing, & a colossal demonstration of how much mastery we've achieved over such a wide wide set of concerns. 5 years ago we didn't even have the shared language to express the goal/desire, the cloud was abstract, but now it's real & something we can do for $120 and a couple hours. And we'll only get better. We're only really just getting started with this inertia, only just started bringing a lot of big ideas into the commons. While the primary drivers are big & medium entities doing ops, this is a huge foothold for the home, for the hobbyist to get going with, to make running software simple but not too simple, to have a platform that scales from very low & easy to very big & fancy. There's a lot of epic & amazing home-cloud stuff going on, & this is all so new, & very technical, but over time I expect a lot of paths to be paved, a lot of lessons learned, and the amazing ultra-leading-edge works like onedr0p's homecloud[1] to spring into bloom & to seed new efforts. Having a rich, high-potential ecosystem that computing & the computing community can build atop of & get good & get more elegant with is a precondition for any other part of computing succeeding. Without good ops, personal computing can go nowhere, and we are so so so much better gathered & doing so much better than we were even half a decade ago.
Once our own computing becomes possible, the spread of p2p & distributed systems might start. Even that doesn't seem ultra-necessary to me. I believe the mediums we have are enormously powerful, enormously flexible, and incredibly distributed if put to use for those ends. Specs like ActivityPub and ActivityStreams can remake how almost all software works, can provide the fabric of connectivity that makes connected networked systems so compelling, so interesting to participate in, without the top-down-control, with self-determinism & agency & genuine ownership of data. That we can have amazing new online vantage points for these wide & diverse feeds of information when we harken to protocols & feeds.
Still missing right now, mobile/low power systems are still trapped in the old world: the most important device we own, our phones, can not participate in the new dawning better-ops cross-system-ops galaxy we are breathing life into. Unlocking mobile from the confines of narrow consumerdom is a long battle, and I mostly hope the overwhelming brilliance of self-hosting Linux makes Linux on the phone too compelling to allow these consumer,
[1] https://github.com/onedr0p/home-cluster
I hate the latest wave of smart stuff, as it all seems mostly user-hostile.
But even without the latest internet connected, google/alexa integration etc, the microcontrollers in devices have been abused to inflict terrible UI's on users for a long time now.
We need a 'unix philosophy' for household appliances and gadgets. Do one thing, well. Facilitate composition.
For example, I want to switch some floor fans (PSC motors) to much more efficient BLDC versions. They all seem to come with LED or LCD displays, timers, remotes, etc, some even integrate with alexa ... No Thanks! I just want more-efficient and quieter fans, perhaps with potentiometer, or at least, much finer-grained speed control as an upgrade over the 3 fixed speeds I have now, which is inherently possible due to BLDC controller. Perhaps an SPI interface so I can add my own smarts if I want to.
I would love to get Google out of my life, but Google Photos is easily my favorite phone app, and I still get a lot of value out of GDocs, GDrive, etc., and managing a Nextcloud instance sounds like more work than I want to do.
I do feel like I have an antagonistic relationship with technology, and as someone who works in technology, that makes me really sad.
I'm reminded that, in the mid-90s, one of Microsoft's branding slogans was "where do you want to go today?" While that seems funny in retrospect, back then MS's software really did let you do more or less whatever you wanted. These days our platforms are becoming more and more locked down, and meanwhile they're actively leaking our personal information to third parties who are the poorest stewards of it imaginable.
I want to be optimistic for the future of technology, but it's really hard to be.
Consumers make myopic choices all the time, and it's legitimate to establish regulations enforcing a more long-term outlook.
This notion is UTTER B.S. and needs to die quickly, and it is wholly unfair to put this on the users and not the creators and big companies.
(Yes, I am lawyer, and it is absolutely immoral to abuse our notions of contract law in this fashion. Gives the whole system a very bad name.)
When manufacturers were letting rat poop get into the ketchup, we didn't create the FDA to make sure that "rat poop" was clearly printed on the label.
(edited to sound a bit nicer)
also search is quite good
personally not using any cloud backup
Assuming you're protesting CSAM detection, you should know that Google has been doing this forever.
https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/1033093...
No idea specifically about Google Pay though, like if it demands a proprietary device for "security". I personally don't see the appeal of new forms of surveilled payments - the plastic cards in my wallet work just fine for that.
Also I can't say this enough - if you're apprehensive about trying out LOS or LOS+microG, get a second device. It only runs on certain devices anyway, so most likely you'll be buying used for $100-$200. You don't have to take a leap all at once - rather you can try different apps gradually.
(Although at this point I hope Pinephone is gaining on LOS. You might consider focusing your attention there, even though it's much less ready for prime time from what I understand)
there are multiple hosted options where you don't have to manage the server - instead, you'll get admin access to your nextcloud, you can add accounts for Family members or freelancers whenever needed and it mostly "just works". When using a Nextcloud client, the only additional step that is needee compared to Dropbox etc is providing the server URL.
I would definitely like to flash the firmware on a Smart TV, and would happily pay a subscription for high-quality privacy focused software.
I have recently started to run pi-hole as I was appalled my the sheer number of awful in-app ads on my TV and my kids’ tablets. It’s messed a few things up but the trade off seems worth it for me.
The one exception is the phone. Phones are a wonder (disaster?) of vertical integration and if you're outside one of the two walled gardens it's like living on another planet. Ride-hailing apps, games, dating-apps, even SMS! can be unsupported or flaky on the analogous open alternatives. After the recent Apple announcement I ordered a Pinephone but I'm not expecting much more than a toy.
Accordingly, you can do most of the above and have it fly under the radar when having guests over, but the moment you whip out the non *droid/iOS phone around friends you've outed yourself.
Basic integration of all these solutions often ends up with a less satisfactory solution than a “commercial”/closed source version.
I’m sure some naysayers will come up with platitudes like “no funding makes it more difficult” and “well it’s open source just fix it”.
For the first one, like I said some of the bugs or cumbersome problems are not even difficult to reproduce. Basic pointing and clicking by the devs would find it.
For the second, come on, they can’t just misdirect all their users with “fix it yourself” - we might not know how, might not know the language or framework, or simply might not want to spend the time trying to figure out some tedious workflow involving self hosted Git repos or some poorly documented spaghetti build process. At the end of the day the devs themselves are in the best position to fix.
A lot of the closed-source software is also quite bad, but in a wholly different way: Sure, the UI is clean and the software is not complicated per se, but often your ability to simply retrieve information has been intentionally degraded in favor of an algorithmic discovery queue. The UI, while simple enough, changes for no good reason far too often. Often these UI changes are seemingly for the worse, so I can only guess that they improve "engagement." And of course, although the application may be simple to use, it's often built with "dark patterns," which are meant to shape your behavior. Yes, you can ignore or overcome these, but it's a hurdle which should never exist in the first place.
By contrast, I don't think anyone loves Rhythmbox, (the open source itunes clone) but I've been using it for a decade and the UI has not appreciably changed at all. The application is definitely not perfect, but I can at least work around its flaws because those flaws are consistent. And really, why would a file-based music player need to change its UI much at all? There are no dark patterns to speak of, it's not trying to addict me into consuming more content, or paying for some subscription service.
You're underestimating the difficulty of fixing bugs, even if they are "not difficult to reproduce". Most FOSS devs are doing all this work for free and most of the time the only feedback they get is "you're UI, UX is broken/bad". What incentive do they have to spend days of their free time optimizing the UX?
Software like that will be easy to find when people will be ready to pay.
There is nothing to say that a company must derive their revenues from a single source. It has always been like that, or at least it has been like that for a very long time. Newspapers derive their revenue from both sales to readers and sales of advertising. If you subscribe, they also sell the subscriber data. The same thing can be said of warranty cards. You don't see them as much these days since it turns out to be far more reliable to force people to register their product when they first turn it on, but it was always a way to get marketing (and marketable) data.
If "enough" people are willing to pay "enough," the ads will magically reappear and you will find that now you're paying less than "enough."
The day something like a pi-hole can be installed as easily as a sim card, and can be left alone running without having to interact with it via the terminal will be the day open source software would have gotten mainstream coverage (No, Linux is not mainstream, unless you consider Android)
That being said, I do feel that it does lead to passivity, particularly when there is a single dominant player in the market. Case in point: Office before GSuite.
Two issues I wouldn't know how to solve are:
(1) backups - not having backups for your personal data would be utterly irresponsible, but adding an E2E encrypted cloud backup to the package would come with substantial recurring costs
(2) public Internet access - from what I understand very few Internet providers will allow you to just run a publicly-accessible webserver from your home router, and for a lot of people it's going to be a bad idea due to having a crap router and horribly unsecured devices on their local LAN. You would have to add a cloud-hosted bastion server, which could be super small and cheap, sure, but it's still a monthly cost and now your 'personal cloud' is reliant on Hetzner or whomever, killing the product's sales pitch
2. public internet access - skip it, setup a vpn.
Also, I am the greyest of greybeards @ 50yo.
It makes you want to cry, but it's honestly killing me. I hope you picked a job that forces you into the fewest ethical dilemmas and treats you well.
As someone who lives in the country, who does share our back country roads with horses and buggies as well as cars, trucks, and farm equipment... our local community works just fine with many different people making different choices about how much technology they choose to bring into their homes.
I believe thinking about such questions and making your own decisions is an extremely healthy habit, no matter where your final decisions fall.
Somehow I envision decentralized future in which people will use bootstrapped and FOSS software on small private networks. In my country, before big internet centralization there were small internet providers who offered all kinds of information services. When this time comes, some will be prepared to lead the way. And some will follow, as always.
I have 3 years old degoogled Lineage phone, because you can't really buy new phone with good camera and normal size, I am using phones without gapps since I lived in China and not really missing Google apps, onyl Google apps in my phone are GBoard (with no internet access) and GTRanslate which I don't really use
I'm running 10 year old thinkpad with SSD and more RAM and hooked external dispaly/mouse/kbd
I don't use features of my smart TV, because smart TCL was unbearably dumb, coudln't sideload anything, didn't have app store, so I bought Android TV stick (some cheap Xiaomi for 40USD) just so my kids can watch Youtube (dummy account, not that I woud use Google services anyway even on computer) since the one built in was constantly freezing and when they were away for vacation I enjoyed playing old games through emulators with gamepad
I have camera in kid's room, so I can check them in night, while watching torrented TV shows/movies from USB flashdrive plugged in my TV in living room (I've had Netflix for year and only thing I used it for was show Peppa pig to kids, still rather downloaded all my stuff through USB stick or hooked laptop with HDMI cable)
besides these, no smart devices in my household, no speakers, kids not using phones or tablets at all, while older is starting primary school, though they read a lot books, play with real toys and draw, not sure when I will introduce them to phones, not rushing
only social networks I use are Twitter and Reddit, ofc not with real name, I'm not backing up my photos anywhere online, only physical backups
I hate how technology only relates to his personal computer
So yes it's indeed tech veganism. Pushing something worthwhile, selectively, to its limits way beyond practicality.
At this point, they are just giving people the finger simply for the hell of it. I'll bet debian will run on there and I won't ever buy another mac.
Its like the razor companies always changing the cartridge formats so your razor handle becomes useless and you're forced to buy a new one or go back to safety razors. Its the waste that bothers me most.
I am back to safety razors for shaving and Linux is the closest equivalent.
The machine isn't really usable with the current OSes, being dog slow at everything.
But you do bring up an interesting point. I have had the same issues with Windows on older hardware. Which makes me wonder why hardware with 2.5-3GhZ CPUs and SSDs is not enough to run a current version of an OS even with 4-6 GB of RAM.
Developers are always happy when they can deprecate old systems because their new code can assume the shiny new fast hardware and full-featured API of the new OS.
QA is even happier.
Newer CPUs have hardware for AES decryption and other such stuff. Hardware can do it about 100x faster than software. OS manufacturers have spread "security" all through their stack.
Still watch WWDC and other Apple keynotes but meh... I am excited about the new M chips. Had an M1 Macbook Pro until I quit that job and had to turn it in lol. It was hands down amazing / best Apple laptop experience I've had in a long time. Holding out for the next chip revision until I get a new personal one.
What excites me now - I've gotten pretty heavily into 3d printing. Have 2 printers working side by side now (thinking about a 3rd) Started out as just something to print random crap for around the house - under cabinet coffee mug holder, wall hooks, pen holder, etc... Now, I've gotten into (back into) RC cars and robotics - finishing up a motorized Wall-E Replica and an F1 RC car (based on OpenRC). I plan to design my own RC car soon. Have designed some of my own parts and am thinking about getting into production / trying to sell some stuff on Etsy or whatever.
Will it evolve into a career change of some sort? Not sure. But the path I'm going down is similar to how I got into web development; casual at first, then got an entry level job and been doing it for 20 years now. After 20 years, web development is blah. Constantly chasing the next best JS framework; trying to 1up the next candidate looking for the same job to stay relevant. Just getting exhausting.
One big difference between me and Mr. Lawson is that I'm not entirely opposed to running hostile apps. I do use WhatsApp because I live in Western Europe where not doing so would, sadly, cut me off from 90% of social life. I still use Google Maps because I need business contact / opening hours / restaurant menu information far more than I do accurate GPS navigation (but I would freeze it and whip out OSMAnd+ if I needed to navigate to my local dissident society meetup). And I use GBoard because it's just smoother than Anysoft or Floris or other OSS keyboards.
However, I consider them hostile apps so while I choose to run them, I don't want to let them run unrestricted; I sandbox them as much as possible. GBoard has no internet access, period; neither does Google Translate (after downloading the language files I cared about). My phone doesn't have a built-in Google Account, so Google Maps runs in anonymous mode (I send bookmarks to Joplin); it constantly brings up a popup complaining that it can't run without Play Services, but immediately proves itself a liar by running perfectly anyway.
For other apps, TrackerControl forbids them from connecting to any domain I don't explicitly allow. Insular prevents them from accessing my local data. Thankfully, the only data-hoovering apps that I need to janitor in such a way are WhatsApp and Tinder; everything else either has a FOSS client, or runs as a webapp (my browser, of course, has an extensive and very very clunky suite of privacy addons).
Most importantly, I have a simple rule of not doing or writing anything on WhatsApp that I would be embarrassed to see plastered on a billboard in front of my house - thankfully that encompasses 99% of my everyday life. For the remaining 1% of content, I find people are more understanding when I tell them 'mind if we discuss this over a phone call or Signal?'.
One last thing, since I mentioned the TrackerControl app - although I try not to be a tech vegan and simply say that I have a passion for tinkering and a bit of a paranoid streak, I've found most people's eyes to light up a little up when I open TC and show them how a random innocuous app is connecting to a half-dozen different social media websites. It's not enough to convert anyone - and I wouldn't try anyway, given how cumbersome even a plain LineageOS installation is to maintain - but it does give them pause, and they at least claim to understand why I may care about this stuff.
This hasn't been my experience at all. I find my devices often work much better than my peers' devices. Just yesterday, I blew someone's mind by being able to unzip a password protected zip and open a password protected pdf with my phone. They had been sending people documents like this for years and never saw anyone open it with their phone. Open source software is often more powerful than the mainstream alternatives, and the algorithms are easier to control, rather than be controlled by. Yes, it takes a bit of knowhow and work to configure things and get them running smoothly. But even the discipline itself has benefits. My guiding principle in all this is "Program or be programmed".
My most-used means of file transfer is "e-mailed zip file", and generally this works well - until, of course, someone can't open a zip file on their phone. Which I'd assume is most phone users. The phone doesn't need an unzip utility, because a phone user expects a link to some cloud service (Google Photos, etc.) to achieve the same thing. The content doesn't live on the device; it's just a dumb terminal.
Taken to its extreme, I recently had to downmix several HD videos taken on a phone onto a DVD, and _physically mail it overseas_, because even the cloud option wasn't open to the user.
> The thing that has always bothered me about this, and which continues to bother me, is that I’m only able to live this lifestyle because I have the technical know-how. The average person would neither know how to do any of the things I’m doing (installing a custom Android ROM, setting up Nextcloud, etc.), nor would they probably want to, given that it’s a lot of extra hassle for a sub-par experience.
I used to run my own mail server. Heck, I used to lease out shell accounts and run email for other people. But gmail is just better at dealing with spam, probably because they manage a huge fraction of all email.
I still have the 20-year old email address, ticking over, delivering mail into a shell account run by someone else. It's about 50% spam, 49% things I've not bothered to unsubscribe from, and 1% really important stuff from long-dormant sources that I'd forgotten about. And of course it's there if I need to go back for whatever reason.
For instance, I run a tablet on my kitchen counter with the homeassistant interface. It displays photos when not in use.
My piHole setup (multiple of them for redundancy) can be paused from the homeassistant dashboard.
There's a different dashboard for access to Plex or other web UIs. Everything runs behind a reverse proxy with pretty URLs and authentication is from a single source usually.
The one bit of magic is the vpn for when you're out of the house. So it goes.
Yes but can you make a phone call? Have you ever tried to make a phone call on your cell phone and it did not work? I have, on multiple occasions. I cannot say the same thing for a land line.
Are you saying iOS and Android can’t do those things? Because they definitely can — the reason they never saw anyone do it is probably because most people wouldn’t bother trying.
Why even give your 4-year-old a smartphone? If you absolutely must give your child a phone, why not just a flip phone or a kid's phone?
Modern flip phones are clunky. I got a 5 year old, kids are smart. She would be able to use a smartphone if I allowed her too.
What's it going to take to get technology that actually respects BOTH privacy and freedom?
Firewall rules, use of many networks & vlans, and different ssids for different type of wifi traffic. Make for a secure home.