The fact you are torn between privacy and latest tech products means you are already waaay ahead of most of people (who don’t even realize/care that there is a privacy conscious way to be online). It’s a great discussion to prompt and I look forward to seeing more responses.

The path of privacy focused stuff should be a path we choose for its own merits not a difficult rocky road we martyr ourselves on, don’t beat yourself up about caving in and going for the glittery new tech (sometimes).

You are correct. Privacy communities like to be idealistic instead of realistic. You can go either Stallman (which almost none of these Orwell-spamming idealists ever do) or go for a Marxist-Leninist realism approach, doing what is necessary to find the balance.

I call this the paradox of freedom with anti-privacy tools.

To make it brief, the freedom you get from accessing to Discord or Telegram communities is immense. By cutting yourself off on the basis of phone number requirement, you end up also restricting your freedom of knowledge by increasing your freedom of privacy. This also makes it clear they are either incapable of compartmentalisation, or lack the hardware resources to do so.

I practice my OPSEC while feeding data anywhere and have advocated for threat modelling to people with my easy guide, and assist many people via DMs and chats. I have advocated for compartmentalisation a lot. Some fake reddit privacy communities have started copying my approach, but they are as good as a copycat is compared to someone with experience and real world understanding.

Feel free to talk to me, and honestly, crosspost this over to c/privacy and on r/privatelife if you have reddit account. This might be worth a discussion.

As a fellow novice, I certainly empathize with the sentiments here. It’s somewhat of pain that I can no longer see what some friends are up to on social media (the fear of missing out is strong at times…) and the smaller communities of the federation often lack activity for non-tech topics. On the positive side however, I can keep up with the entirety of Lemmy pretty easily.

As far as a journey is concerned, my strategy has been to move incrementally. And fairly slowly. It also helps that I don’t have any specific needs and can comfortably sacrifice some functionality in certain areas. Having extra hardware is a good idea; I do that as well. I spent most of a year using Linux Mint on a spare laptop from a sibling before even considering improving my mobile phone privacy. Then first by test runs with F-Droid apps on my bootloader-locked phone, which took a few months, before finally purchasing a used Pixel 3a to load GrapheneOS. I still have to keep my locked phone around for my family group chat though, since that app cannot run on a de-Googled phone. So I’m not entirely out of Google’s grip. I still use Youtube (might try Invidious out soon), Discord, and play games through Steam on Windows 10. Make the compromises that seem appropriate for now, and circle back to them later. One of the most frustrating things about this is the amount of information and effort required to achieve even moderate privacy, so I view it as a marathon. I do what I can, in small steps.

And should I ever feel as though I just want to begin to use new, easy, convenient service or product X, I sober up by actually reading the TOS (Terms of Service) and Privacy Policy, or EULA (End User License Agreement). One of the most horrific ones I’ve read is for the AT&T USA (i.e., bootloader-locked) version of the Samsung Galaxy S5, which explicitly only leases the operating system to the user.

Thought I was the only that feels this way. I try to stay away from anything too mainstream/centralized but that’s where the majority of people are at. Decentralized platforms are ghost towns in comparison. It’s also a hassle to convert people into using privacy messaging apps so sometimes I just give into using sms and try not to disclosed anything too personal.