For the kind of people that use IG handles as a way to keep in contact, do you truly think you can say “Oh, I only have Mastadon” and even have them know what you’re talking about?

Stay strong! Just because people call to you from their walled garden doesn’t mean you need to lock yourself in there as well.

Depends entirely on the audience. The problem with privacy issues is that privacy nihilism sets on quickly, and people with short attention spans and no intrinsic idea of how much they’re being ripped off quickly take refuge in the comfort of a no-friction status quo.

An IG account isn’t a phone number or email, and I think it’s weird that young people treat it like it is.

Just say you don’t do social media, and if they can’t respect that, it’s a quick test as to if they’re your people or not.

Why not?

If their email servers are flagging you incorrectly, correct them. Worst case scenario, nothing changes.

Hm. Well, either you’ve been flagged by someone else, or may be just the unlucky recipient of a wrongful profiling back when Proton was new. But it seems to me that it’s an individual problem, either your email address in particular, or your recipient.

If it were me, I would have a couple friends with gmail go and specifically mark my address as safe and trusted. Especially anyone that has your emails sent to spam.

Beyond that, maybe email some Google support and ask to be white listed.

I have both for years, and never had a single Proton email go to gmail spam. Both personal gmail and a corporate Google Office account.

If it’s a custom domain, it’s likely a DKIM issue. Otherwise, this sounds like an issue with the recipient having previously marked an email from Proton as spam.

This should absolutely be held up as the example for people that say “I have nothing to hide.”

The world isn’t fun time sunshine lollipops, kids. It’s literally inevitable that your data gets leaked or stolen.

You either naïvely trust the service you give data to more than you should, or you naïvely trust criminals to skip you when given the opportunity. There no evidence of a middle ground or other options in the matter.

IIRC, they’ve stated that they won’t accept Monero because it means they would fail external financial audits they need to remain in operation in Switzerland. Sign all you want, they won’t do this.

Plus - y’all, email is not secure anyway. Even Proton. Why would you sign a petition to make the payment method more anonymous than the service they provide? Just send them cash by DHL.

The problem with this is that it leaves left-leaning people using tech companies and slick, highly-produced products as status items. iphones and macbooks are still solid left-leaning status objects.

Also, the right doesn’t mind being scrappy and using janky, poorly configured crap if it appears to meet their agenda. Nearly every right-leaning social media platform is either a platform with a Mastadon backend, or some early 2000’s style forum.

It can look professional when you aren’t posting a gmail address and the domain isn’t poopypants.net

Pick something neutral that isn’t your name. Try a band name generator. JupiterEvolition.net or IdealMachine.XYZ,.which sound better than herpderp common gutter trash Gmail.com

Having a custom domain means you get things like me@IdealMachine.XYZ and also chosen.one@… And bestcandidate@… Etc. So you can make something for professional stuff, and then chocolate.starfish@IdealMachine.xyz to be funny.

Slight sarcasm - I’m also a Mint user, and it was like a recursive reference to this meme from forever ago. Maybe it was too specific and dated, but the point is that since Macs were so easy to use, the Windows people back in the 8.1 days treated Mac users like kindergartners as they paid for their $1,000 facebook machines (also a meme from that time).

All the “Yeah, I use Arch, BTW” people that love the struggle and the hobbyist tweaks of their distros seem to look down on Mint users because it doesn’t require a struggle to use Mint. I used to see it all the time when I first jumped over to Linux.

For the most part, it works well without needing too much tinkering by the user. It’s the Fisher Price My First Distro.

I tried it out with a 21.3 dualboot with Windows 11 and within 2 or 3 months I hadn’t gone back to Windows other than to push files over. Sure, there were a few “learning opportunities” with tweaks or weird driver issues that were because of the particular hardware I’m using, but they were manageable. At this point I’m running 22.1 only on this machine.

The nice part is that being Ubuntu-based, if I run into a problem, I can search for both the more widely-documented Ubuntu version of the issue, or look for a Mint-related version. Claude does a great job with small-to-medium troubleshooting rather than me dig through forums. It’s low-risk, low-work, high-reward.

I also truly hate “family groups” where phones and accounts commonly associated with you get just pings on a topic to make you more malleable to the idea when you finally get the ads.

Domains cost like $1 if you’re flexible. Email hosting is what costs money.

Most people have absolutely zero idea how much data they put out there, what’s done with it, and why any rational person would be horrified if they knew the extent to which individuals were tracked. Simply put, short of showing them how their lives are made worse, they don’t care, and can’t be made to care.

For friends and family, you can do things like give them books or send articles explaining it slowly in parts. For everyone else, just ask them if they know how Google tracks what they do in Incognito windows and see what they say. If they say that Google can’t or doesn’t, they might as well say the Earth is flat. You can’t argue with that, even though it’s provably false.

I 100% agree with you about Clearview and Palantir. Really, 1,000%.

Putin, on the other hand, has passed his peak unless he’s gong to get the nukes out. His potential at this point is simply how much longer he is around to keep perpetuating his “3 day war.” Which is not nothing. The guy needs to go the fuck away, and the US justification for using nukes in Japan was that forcing a surrender via attack against civilian targets prevented a years-long slog and invasion. Well, here we are again. Justify whatever is needed to ensure he falls out a window one day this week. The power vacuum without Prighozin around is just going to revert to 1992 style robber barons anyway. It always would. There’s never been an alternative to that.

Yes, but so are the ads!

What do they mean by “neighborhood”? The domain? Or the top level .LA?

Is your email something like myemail@subdomain.njal.la?

Seems harsh, but it’s hard to unblock a subdomain while blocking the rest of a domain.

Let’s say you use a VPN, and all your internet traffic comes from an IP in London. 178.238.10.1.

It doesn’t matter if you have a VPN, if you log in to anything with any account tied to your real name (yourname@gmail.com), your email and anything done on that London IP are all linked. Google builds a profile on you based on the activity on that IP. AND your browser profile. Private/incognito window or not, if there’s a Google tracker on the site, they connect it all. Google doesn’t care about private windows. If you go to reddit in a private window on the same IP as your gmail, Google sees that and tracks every page you look at.

So let’s say that you log into your email from work. Google now has a treasure trove of new info about you and people you know. Same for FB, who uses the fact that you and someone else were logged on from the same IP range to suggest new friends.

Let’s pretend that you live in China and still have access to a VPN and want to learn about the Tienanmen Square Massacre. But the government can ask Google about you. What do you need?

• an IP never ever used with an account associated with an account with your real name.
• a no-log VPN that won’t tattle on you if asked what sites did you access on a specific date.
• a browser fingerprint never ever associated with an account tied to your real name.