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.

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.

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.

Google and other companies make it extremely convenient and easy, so you don’t need to be technically inclined to use their services and everyone already uses them. Asking someone to join the Fediverse requires them to understand what it is, and deal with the learning curve; if they aren’t technically inclined, they are almost certain to refuse, and even many technically capable ones don’t care enough.

Signal is a much better compromise; private enough that it isn’t creepy to use, and easy enough that anyone who uses WhatsApp can pick up without difficulty or friction. Even then, only a small percentage of the people in my life use it. It is what it is.

You can’t force people to care. The vast majority of people never even heard of FOSS, never heard of self-hosting (or even know what hosting is), and don’t get me started on the Fediverse… Most people don’t care about privacy either; my mother for example is the “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” type.

When you say “they refuse to take part”, it puts too much blame on people, you can’t expect people to do something that they don’t understand or care enough about. It’s like if I asked you to come with me to protest against something you’ve never heard of, but in order to understand what’s wrong with it, you need a long lecture and actually pay attention. Corporations spent hundreds of billions on making their services and products really convenient and easy, so they have to screw up really badly to get people to switch.

What you are feeling is natural and relatable. You need to find a balance and define your threat model.

Privacy maximalism and/or FOSS maximalism etc is natural impulse when you first begin to grasp just how quietly exploitive, invasive, and commoditized the modern internet is. But it also leads to burnout and can be isolating if you are too rigid about it.

Define your threat model, and your priorities. Accept that perfection is not attainable and do the best you can. It’s less overwhelming.

My advice:

• pick ONE easy to use and well established/reputable messenger that is privacy respecting (Signal is the obvious choice in my eyes). Make it known that this is your preferred messenger (and have a short, not super technical and not super political explanation why you prefer it). Try to get the people you are closest with or communicate with most, and the people you think are most likely to be interested to start using it.
• Then, have a preferred fallback or two (basically the “least worst” mainstream option). Depending on your circle, iMessage, RCS, WhatsApp, or Telegram might be that fallback. None are anywhere near perfect but they also aren’t the worst and sometimes you have to meet people where they are.

I’ve been on both sides of this table. Yes, I wish people would move away from WhatsApp but that’s not going to happen. They’re not going to even make an effort to begin to understand Signal just to talk to me. I could just not use WhatsApp and use Signal to talk to myself, that’d be fun.

I understand their frustration as well, people already have too many message apps already. WhatsApp, telegram, hangouts, SMS, Slack, Discord… When asked to install a new app they are naturally reluctant to install yet another messaging app just to talk to me and only me. I too have that one friend who bugs me every couple of months to install the new cool message app that is going around. Currently that SimpleX, wonder what comes next.

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.

I know what you mean, but people are all like “but I can post on Facebook with Siri without having to think” or whatever.

Pushing your family isn’t going to help, unfortunately. There’s a pretty low threshold of nagging at which they’ll start being less inclined to take your advice for any additional bit of nagging.

My advice: make peace with it. Either quit SMS and Facebook and be aware that it’ll hamper communication with them or use SMS/RCS and Facebook and Google Docs and try to hedge as much as you can against privacy invasion within that context. Or throw caution to the wind and just use whatever they’re willing to use to talk to them.

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

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.

I just don’t worry about it and do my own thing. It’s like veganism lol, it’s not for everyone.

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 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.

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.

Well, I don’t Facebook, Instagram or anything like that and people just know that is not a way to reach me. Facebook is a cesspool.

We do share photos through Google and I do feel censored by that, won’t even take a picture I’d not share with the world.