i’ve been doing this digital sovereignty thing for a few years now and i think i do a pretty good job. among other things, i deleted all of my google accounts, avoid all (mainstream) social media, and do a ton of self hosting. but one thing i constantly struggle with is getting other people to understand why all of that matters. for example, i started running a matrix homeserver after i permanently quit discord about a year ago, and it’s naturally been a pain to stay in contact with some people.

for a while, i ran a discord bridge to make sure i can communicate with some of my more stubborn friends even after i got rid of my discord accounts. it worked really well and was very convenient! there was just one problem: to communicate with me, my friends on discord needed to add a bot to their servers/guilds/whatever discord calls their groups these days; a bridge just proxies messages sent from matrix to discord and vice versa. it takes about three minutes to set up, but unfortunately, that’s a lot of effort for someone who doesn’t even understand why i quit discord in the first place. then when communication becomes difficult, they blame it on me, apparently not realizing that the bridge is already my way of compromising! oh well. i eventually shut down the bridge too since they weren’t using it anyway. luckily, in the past year or so, i have managed to get all of my friends to make accounts on the homeserver i run, and they’ve mostly figured out how to communicate with me. which is not impressive in the slightest and i will never hesitate to shame them for being so difficult for literally no reason.

i think i have a reputation for being really annoyingly preachy, but it’s worked! i have converted three of my friends to linux and they did eventually figure out matrix. i’m sure i sound like a broken record, constantly pointing out everything wrong with google or microsoft or whatever. i guess all it really comes down to is that people don’t care about privacy or security because those kinds of problems are too abstract and intangible to matter. so there’s probably nothing i can say that’d convince my friends to quit using discord for 99% of their communication with other people. again, oh well. all of that is pretty consistent with how oblivious most people are to these issues, and to the fact that they have other options in the first place. i mean, how many people understand that they don’t have to use google search? they might know that other options exist, but know so little about those options (or how google is comparatively bad) that they’d never think to actually try them. overwhelmingly, people just don’t care.

anyway i don’t really have a point i’m trying to get to here. privacy good and google bad, i guess. don’t give up on digital sovereignty just because the problem doesn’t seem real and people mock you for caring about something so abstract and ostensibly meaningless. even it is meaningless, it’s not like you have to have a great justification to care about privacy anyway.