I believe in an open internet, FOSS, privacy by default, etc. I migrated away from Google by self-hosting Nextcloud. I prefer messaging apps like Molly, SimpleX, Threema, Matrix, etc. over standard SMS. I love the Fediverse (Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.).

But everyone I live with and everyone I know simply refuses to take part. I can’t interact with them socially because they’re all on Facebook. I can’t communicate with them because they all use group texts for SMS/RCS. I feel like I’m living in a different part of the world and am completely disconnected from everything that’s going on around me (with the people I want to interact).

My question is: does anyone else experience this, and how do you reconcile it? I want to share photos and clever posts with my family but they aren’t on the Fediverse. I want to communicate securely with them but they only want to SMS. I want to share documents but they only use Google Docs.

There are people I’ve met on the Fediverse and through some secure messaging apps with whom I’ve struck up a rapport, but these are still (predominately) strangers, and I’d really like to involve the people I care about in these exciting new times. They just wont participate.

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.

  • @fubo
    2•8 months ago

    I was on the IT staff at a small academic institution in the late '90s and tried to get administrative staff to use PGP — at least when they were discussing confidential student information that’s covered by FERPA. The most popular mail client was Eudora for Classic MacOS, which did have a PGP plug-in. All you had to do was select a region of text and click a menu item to encrypt or decrypt it, provided that you had the keys in MacPGP for the email recipient.

    But the background knowledge wasn’t there. They didn’t understand why it mattered. I could demonstrate how to encrypt or decrypt … but there was no demo I could give them to show that if you encrypt, you are protecting your data from me (the email sysadmin) and from anyone else who gets root on the mail server.

    Some members of the faculty and staff simply assumed that I could and would read anything they sent in email, and that anything I told them (like “use PGP”) must be backdoored so I could keep doing so. (Sorry, folks, I have enough email of my own. You’re not that interesting.)

    Someone else at the same institution set up a math placement test for new students that used students’ SSNs (!!!) as their passwords … and took them from the financial database, and stored them in world-readable plaintext on the shared web server. My boss had words with them. I think it was decided that it was better to simply not have passwords for that test, and trust that the students will test themselves and sign up for the appropriate math course.