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.
Nobody thinks that avoiding the corps is tin-foil paranoia, all any of us are saying it’s that the absolute insistence on cutting off Google/MS at the cost of alienating friends is pretty tin-foily. This is of course entirely your prerogative and, as I keep saying, isn’t necessarily a bad choice, but it’s not really worth it for the rest of us because of the cost of human connection.
Perhaps your right that my instance isn’t the most secure, but I don’t really give a shit because sometimes connecting with people on the Internet over stupid memes is more important than living a paragon of perfect privacy and security.