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.
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.