This. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I tend to think you can secure yourself some of the gains without rooting your phone, but it’s a lot of twiddling and an ecosystem swap.

I loathe apple, but if you’re not ready to dive in, your home devices are where I would start. Routers, modems, home PCs, learn how to set up encryption and redirection to put things behind. Ditch your roomba.

Edit; I did not mean to talk down, sounds like your on that train. Android is linux and adb is awesome (sometimes).

Keepassdx/xc and syncthing have been awesome, rise up has a decent free VPN client for public use in fdroid.

There can be nothing between apple and the iron grip on it’s users.

Not always. Believe it or not it used to be kinda like it is now, here.

With the technical barriers to entry pre AOL the people online were outcasts, nerds, and science departments at universities. The ad driven model is the attempt to lower barriers of entry make profit of that and not the other way around. Lots of the Internet ran on generosity and donations.

It’s been shittier every day after there was an agreement on how to monetize though. The people at the start didn’t ever have the guarantee it would get adopted, so for all the idealism we deal with their compromises.