What about renting a VPS itself over Tor using Monero, and then letting the VPS do its work normally in the clear?

Probably won’t even need anonymizers for this! Chances are concealing usage of your own server would not be that hard on the clearnet either.

I don’t think it would be enforceable for everyone hosting servers for themselves. I personally use XMPP, Matrix and recently Simplex.

“Cryptobros” =/= “people using crypto”, because this is a legitimate usecase. You can see it discussed on Lemmy too. This is how I can pay for my VPS while my card doesn’t work. This is how I would pay for a service even if my card did work, but I didn’t want to attach pretty much my real name to it. But yea, I agree that it might be complicated logistically. Have seen services where you can buy prepaid cards for crypto - at least that should work.

If there is payment, better support crypto too, because this way you wouldn’t force people to KYC themselves, as well as wouldn’t exclude people from sanctioned regions.

I meant telemetry to Google and/or manufacturer. With grandma, I can at least install Linux on her laptop and say to message me there (that’s pretty much what I did with mom).

Yea, but a typical cellphone is not as easy to make private as a typical laptop or desktop. Lineage has some tradeoffs and not accessible on all devices, and Graphene needs even more specific, quite expensive hardware!

I am suspicious of it because you pretty much cannot host a node. Well, you can - but you’d have to deposit an INSANE amount of money (like $2k or something). While Simplex, even though I do have a concern with its initial centralization by the power of default, is decidedly easy to selfhost.

Signal is annoying to use if you don’t have a smartphone you can trust, since they do not allow registration from desktop. So either an Android VM or Signal-cli. But maybe it was just a one-off bug that the desktop client didn’t bind to signal-cli for me. Still, the fact that you need an unofficial command-line application just to register makes it not exactly user-friendly.

To be fair, pretty much all major XMPP clients have adopted OMEMO encryption, so doesn’t seem like much of an issue.

Effectively not encrypted, requires a smartphone, can be anal about bans, etc.

I still keep the pirated have DRMless copies of games I bought on Steam though - just for ownership.

I don’t watch YT from phone much, but I find Newpipe for videos to be a better experience than browser (it is also much lighter). And similarly Innertune for music.

Does Ublock Origin not work for it anymore? And for phones, there are alternative apps - I use InnerTune.

But you can listen to YouTube music for free too, no?

Recently lived like that for a while - until a laptop replacement part arrived. And now I am skeptical. I refuse to believe someone would go mobile-only willingly and long-time. Maybe if they cannot afford a computer, at max.

I much prefer physical books, and have quite a big library. But most of my textbooks would be either hard or outright impossible to get in paper, so they go onto my e-reader as DRMless pdf and djvu files.

As for movies and music - I don’t see much appeal in physical, since there is no difference in experience between playing from a CD/DVD or from my drive. I still keep my DVDs from childhood, but no longer have any device that can play them (removed the CD drive from the old laptop a while ago). However, I would never rely on streaming like you mentioned either. Only local, DRMless collection. Streaming is just for discovery.

There are degrees of trust though. You can trust the developers and people who audited the code if you have no skill/desire to audit it yourself, or you can trust just the developers.

And even closed systems’ behavior can be monitored and analyzed.

I am very anxious even with normal maintenance - heating adhesive up is not something I am capable of now. So was looking at new last-gen Pixels instead, and 7a is $300 :( People I know who have it say it’s good hardware, but that’s still an insane sum to spend on a phone.

Imagine being able to opt into an long term support branch when you feel your phone starting to lag

That’s kind of what LineageOS does.