Google has pretty much always been a prick, but recently they’ve been showing just how bug a prick they can be, with ramping up company acquisition, destruction and closure, ad obsession, censorship and other anti consumer moves. I believe rooting is essential to privacy, because Google. The less power conglomerates and corporations have the better.

Even better that only the first line was visible until I scrolled

I use DuckDuckGo’s email proxy service, you can sign up for one custom email and generate any amount of temporary-use addresses for the ones you don’t trust to stop spamming when you ask them to. The purpose of their system is to be the address you sign up with, and they do their best to strip trackers and garbage, and forward it onto an email of your choice. You can change the forwarding email at any point, so it can be incredibly useful for a transitioning period.

I use Mailcow dockerized for a home domain, it is actually a very acceptable price for me being able to:

• Control my own DNS rules (it was a nightmare trying to use DuckDNS for an mailserver because of the rules you need to set)
• Run through a reliable service because DuckDNS occasionally went down, making my domain unreachable and breaking external access of any server I run
• Have a personalised public home for myself, if I ever want to make blogs or provide public services or something

I used a very lovely and helpful YouTuber’s guide for it, Opentaq (here)

Same for me. Although I accepted the apparent potential of it when I was asked to provide all my contact information, I’m happy to not find any of my information public.

Absofuckinglutely, I bought ten years of a domain for £50GBP/~$67USD, unique enough that the price bottomed out and I used a country sub (.uk) which is basically half the price of a .com/.org

Plenty of apps on Android are great replacements for centralised services we’ve gotten used to, and can be installed from another source like fdroid, like clients for Telegram, Matrix, Lemmy, Mastodon, Mattermost etc. As they weren’t installed via Google Play, they can’t use Google’s notification service and instead use local alternatives.

1 - I don’t believe you can use Minecraft without Microsoft any more - Mojang accounts were discontinued in favour of Microsoft accounts, and unmigrated accounts were deleted in 2023.

2 - Many updates have happened, but the launcher still lets you download and play every single version released, from major (x.), minor (.xx), to snapshots and one day specials, to the very first working version. Note: the first version is also available to play online for free. The last non-Microsoft update was 1.7.2 I believe

Thanks for saving us a click!

That’s China’s regulation at this point, it’s how their governing body rules the country. Nothing we can do. Meta is harmful to society but this is above board.

Apple’s datacenters have been untrustworthy for a long time, at this point any breaches or data sales of user data is as much the user’s fault. But yeah, from what I’ve seen, corporations never make moves to primarily benefit the consumer, society, state law or otherwise. Only self profit. Sometimes aligning with demand improves profit.

I use Matrix and this is possible via several encryption keys. They just probably cba. How Matrix E2EE works