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?
I'm worried about the current U.S. political climate. Discord is an American company with data about what millions of people are talking about, including their political opinions, minority status, and what groups they associate with. It seems like a goldmine for the government to compile a list of targets to go after in future purges. I don't know how easy it is to tie users with real-world identities (certainly payment info would be one way), but I don't want to find out.
And, well, I guess I'm a coward. I saw privacy as necessary for survival because it might spare me from ending up on the list, at least temporarily. But now I'm starting to realize that hiding might just be a really crappy solution. I'm not doing anything to prevent these purges from happening, and even if I succeeded at flying under the radar, the vast majority of people who believe the same way I do will be dead, hiding, or rotting in gulags. Is that the world I want to live in?
It seems like this short-sighted instinct to save myself is only isolating me and helping the enemy. I just find it hard to accept that I might not get to live much longer after everything I've done. I still have hopes and dreams, and it's difficult to let them go, especially because everyone around me had so much hope for me. I don't want to believe that my life could be cut short in what may become the largest genocide in history. But if I don't come to terms with the truth, I will continue hiding in cold, lonely isolation, foolishly believing that the life I seek can still materialize as long as I stay quiet amidst the encroaching horrors.