I have lots of old friends who I only maintained sparse contact with. When I let my personal email address die (the address they would all have records of), I did not bother to update them with a new address.
They are all on the platform of some surveillance capitalist (e.g. Google or Microsoft). Google & Microsoft both refuse connections from self-hosted residential servers. And even if they didn’t, I am not willing to feed those surveillance advertisers who obviously don’t limit their surveillance to their users but also inherently everyone who makes contract with their users. I cannot support that or partake in pawning myself to subsidize someone else’s service.
I just wonder if anyone else has taken this step.
This. Life is too short to deny myself human contact.
99% of my messages with friends is a variation on “hey, do you want to get together on Thursday, how about 6 at my place”.
This is scrapping a long list of old contacts who might at most every 5—20 years briefly exchange life updates from another part of the world. It’s not denying human contact. When I meet someone new, they either need to reach me a way that’s agreeable to both of us or they need to proxy msgs through a mutual friend.
You’ve both demonstrated to easily back the gatekeepers as you’ve both needlessly chosen to create fedi accounts that are centralized on Cloudflare (lemmy world and shit just works both). You can’t speak with any credibility on the privacy front under those circumstances because you compromise digital freedom even when it yields no meaningful gain.