It is decentralized. None of the issues you bring up are proof of centralization. If you get banned from one instance or don’t like email verification or whatever your beef is, find an instance with whatever policies you like. If you can’t find such an instance, start your own.

If nobody federates with you because your instance is full of people that got banned from everywhere else, that’s decentralization in action and maybe you should stop to consider if there’s a reason nobody wants to interact with you?

I’m sure Google has their own shitty reasons, but also get bent, shitheads 🖕

Within our dataset of several hundred thousand visitors tested in the past 45 days, only one in 4244.39 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.

Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys 12.05 bits of identifying information.

Firefox mobile with various addons, most important of which is probably NoScript

They would just say that they have a different definition of E2EE, or quietly opt you out of it and bury something in their terms of service that says you agree to that. You might even win in court, but that will be a wrist slap years later if at all.

It’s possible and I’ve done it, but you have to manually bridge each room, and keep the bridges in sync if you ever add/remove channels. There’s a github issue for bridging a discord server as a space in matrix that would do that automatically, but there hasn’t really been any activity on it:

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord/issues/738

F-droid is good like the other comment suggested. Aurora store is good for anything not available on F-droid.

One thing you can do is track what network connections apps are making with something like https://f-droid.org/packages/com.emanuelef.remote_capture/. It won’t help if the OS really wants to do malicious things, but you can monitor your apps at least

If you’re not using a custom ROM, you’re leaking info like a sieve to OnePlus. I moved to LineageOS because the default OS was sending every app you opened and when to the mothership. Even if they’ve stopped that, they’ve got every incentive to suck you dry, and you’ll spend much more time fighting your OS than if you just switch to a different one.

Use Fastmail, and you can have masked email addresses that come in like regular email. You can look at the “To:” line to tell where the email was sent to, but the title remains the same.

You can use Tor and your IT won’t be able to see what you’re browsing. They will be able to see that you’re using Tor, and might get grumpy about that, though.

And if you don’t have a VPN set up, use Tor on your phone:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.torproject.torbrowser

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/onion-browser/id519296448

The analogy would be that I get a robot to identify the ads in the magazine and cut them out before I have to see them. That’s what ad blockers do, but on a computer instead of IRL.

I don’t know why I’d flip out when encountering a paywall or login. It works out great, and as a society we don’t have to end up with ads enshittifying everything they touch.

You’re missing the point, but your example is perfect. If I have a magazine or newspaper, I’ll cut the advertisements out of them if I damn well please, and they can’t stop me. Sure, I’m not entitled to their hosting or their content, but that’s what paywalls or logins are for. When you hand off a document to someone, expect that they’ll do what they want with it, because that’s the way the world works, and also the way it should work.

Also, fuck billboards. They should be banned, like several states already do.

You’ve got yourself mixed up. They’re not entitled to my compute, or my eyeballs. They handed my browser a pile of HTML, and I’ll do what I want with it.

You could buy them a drink to install it. That’s how I got my family onto Signal. I also got my GF onto Element, but she’s also obligated to put up with my shit

Not sure about syncing, but I use Aegis on Android and it works well

i.e. Matrix with the client of your choice, if anyone’s confused, they both speak the same protocol

If you’re talking to the public, nothing you say is private. That includes federated systems like Mastodon and Lemmy. If you want privacy and federation, using an encrypted Matrix chat. There’s still of course the caveat that the people you’re talking with can leak your chats, since they have a copy of them, so don’t talk to glowies.