Over the past several months, I've been going down the privacy rabbit hole and started ditching centralized, non-E2EE services like Discord. I've been avoiding mainstream services and managed to coax a couple of my existing Discord friends (though not most of them) to use more private services like Matrix.
There's only one problem: Nobody uses them. There is virtually no way to meet like-minded people who live near me because there just aren't enough people or communities on there. Even on Lemmy (which I know isn't totally private, but still beats Reddit) doesn't have the volume needed to come across a lot of people who live near me. I want to meet people. I want to have friends in real life.
I don't live in an urban planner's utopia. I live in a car-dependent suburb on the outskirts of a city. You can't just walk outside and meet a bunch of people, not with all of the "get off my lawn" types everywhere. You have to go somewhere else to meet people. There are cameras everywhere, so you will probably be seen in most normal meetup spots. Not to mention all of the phones.
I hate to say it, but I don't see how it's feasible to meet up with normal people without some corporation or the government finding out where you're going and who you're associated with, at least not in the U.S. where I live.
If we insist on living as hermits who only use obscure Internet services, aren't we ceding influence to the exact forces that are ruining society in the first place? Aren't we at our weakest when we're isolated and alone, yelling into an echo chamber of scattered individuals instead of forming strong local communities in the real world and educating people who aren't fully in the know?
I'm not saying that these services don't have value; I'm just starting to doubt that you can make new irl friends and be totally private at the same time. Showing up to a meetup or event with a bunch of face-covering gear and telling people to follow you to a remote place where there aren't any cameras is probably going to raise some major red flags.
But maybe I'm taking it too literally. Maybe private services are more for discussing sensitive stuff with people you already know. That's why I wanted to ask Lemmy. What do you think? How do you approach this tradeoff between privacy and staying connected with everyday people?
Meeting people IRL (normal or not normal people, whatever that means) is how it is done. Without depending on any app, corporation or government. As a matter of fact, it is how those two started being a thing: people met and started doing things together and realized things would be even simpler if they formalized things and established some common rules.
Also, the first smartphone dates back from around 2007. That was 18 years ago. And there was no 'app' to speak of with that 1st smartphone, there was not even an app store to install apps from (this would take a few more releases before it was introduced). Do you think, not living in big crowded cities, people could not meet before 2007? ;)
Meeting people IRL is simple, and it is still free and legal to do it privately (for the time being at least). But it can also be frightening when all you're used to is 'apps'.
Like you said you have to go somewhere, anywhere you fancy, on feet or by car, public transit, whatever. The idea being to go where other 'like-minded' people are.
What will help (a lot) is to have some common interest, hobby or activity that you can use as a motivation. Say, participate in the town meetings, go to the church (no matter what one thinks about religion it's still a a way to meet people from your community), go pick a book at the local library.
And repeat it. Regularly. So, other people will start noticing you. So you will start noticing other people and a conversation can start. Just people together.
Hobbies are another great way to meet people IRL.
I like playing chess and watercolors (and books), DIY. But it could be anything.
Games? Find a local place where people meet to play board games. There is none? Go the public library and see with the librarian if they know anyone that would be interested to start such a club with you. Librarians will often a lot of people. The smae with, say, knitting, or photography, reading, writing, running,...
It's only very recently people decided they needed an app and, could it really be a coincidence, it is around the same time it has become so hard for younger people to meet people irl.
So I don't disagree that this is the best way to do it, and I find your suggestions helpful, but... what about the phones in people's pockets that could be recording and the security cameras inside buildings?
Doesn't that data end up in the hands of a corporation that aggregates data about everything you do, or am I being way too paranoid/conspiratorial about this? I assumed that machine learning algorithms would make it trivial to automatically parse and aggregate all of that data for every individual, but maybe I'm overestimating the scope and accuracy of these systems.
People are not supposed to be recording every thing all the time. But that's a valid point you're making as that trend is changing: cc cameras are everywhere and, well, people seem obsessed with the idea of recording (and sharing) every single thing they do (I'm surprised there is not pooping social networks... as it's one thing all people have in common ;). So, I would say, it depends people, the place they're in, and its policy.
Say, our personal place has no camera and no recording at all (no smart shit either, not even smart light bulbs or smart doorbell). And when we invite people they can be assured there will be no recording as we would not allow anyone to record anything without asking our (and anyone else present) explicit permission. And if anyone would not agree with that choice, well you know: our home, our rules—they would get kicked out of our home as quickly as needed which may already have happened maybe.
It also depends the laws in your country. here in Europe (I live in France), with the GDRP we can count on a relative level of privacy: people are not supposed to be sharing any picture of a person without their consent. But in reality that is very relative and very... subject to not persist much longer, as surveillance of every move and of every word of their citizens, sorry, I meant to say ' the protection of the children' is our representatives latest excuse to screw us a little more and to deprive everyone of a little more of their rights. I imagine they have not asked for thought control (to make sure some hidden pervert has no dirty thought when seeing a little children in the street or on the TV) just because the technology is not here, not yet.
Imho, what matters the most is to keep reminding (or teaching) people around us that there is no need to record absolutely everything they do or every place they go to. And that there is such a thing as intimacy and privacy.