to be fair - kind of yeah. I do have a bank card, but minimize its usage for privacy reasons, mainly using cash. As for electronics - I do keep most of my data local and use OSes that don't upload them on their own.

And yeah, as the previous commenter said - those are not quite comparable.

When it comes to age verification - I still don't understand how you'd make it subpoena-proof? Like, the ones I've seen proposed protect you from the site itself getting more data than it should. But what about a government agency subpoenaing the website to see what credential this account was verified with and then comparing with the age-assuring agency's logs?..

Thankfully, Ublock Origin in advanced mod can block those requests by default. It's just very irritating and I'd say disrespectful when you HAVE to unblock them for the site to work.

It also works with Gadgetbridge without having to pair it in the official app first (for Xiaomi bands, you need to do it to extract a key, not sure how consistently it's doable nowadays). Apparently the supported featureset is not as complete as for Xiaomi devices, but seems to be enough to cover the basics.

So Huawei are also easier to use without having to send your data anywhere.

A few corrections: - Matrix does not require you to host a server, even if I'd prefer it - there are multiple public ones in various jurisdictions. - There is XMPP - like Matrix, but older, jankier, much lighter and kind of freer. - Weird to call Simplex "centralized" if you did acknowledge that it's selfhostable... But it's indeed weird that last I've seen, there's not some directory with the public servers like there is for Matrix/XMPP. They seem to be going with adding other servers to defaults instead, like they did with Flux recently.

There are methods to bypass the Chinese Firewall though. the issue is getting people to use them.

How can people use them for long if they get a knock on the door, from authorities who noticed an anomaly?

What anomalies are they looking for? There are protocols that make traffic look like something mundane.

Have you seen what classifier AI can do?

Go make a protocol that fools all the AIs from every angle, that are scanning 24/7. They can get you on the metadata pattern alone, nevermind even the content.

We already have this - it's called Tor and I2P.

There is an easier way - going with a selfhostable, federated solution. And at least XMPP is now commonly used with an encryption protocol that is based on Signal's.

I just gave up on smartphones altogether. It is much easier to make a laptop/desktop private instead and limit your private messaging and activities to it.

However 2FA. They're making it hard to not have a phone

I have a separate KeepassXC database for 2FA. I guess my life experience is limited, but I am yet to encounter cases when this would be outright required. The closest one was Steam, but I used an Android VM for this.

But that doesn't fit in a pocket.

Keeping stuff in pockets is overrated. There are ridiculously small portable laptops though.

https://www.gpd.hk/gpdmicropc

This Is The Way.

Bonus: you get a real keyboard.

I use XMPP with OMEMO for my main encrypted messaging, and I don't get why Matrix got popular instead of XMPP (aside from a big marketing budget). Even a lighter server implementation takes up several times more resources than an XMPP server, plus the concerns about the enormous central instance.

XMPP FTW.

Last time I checked (2018) the support for media&file sharing was in a quite bad shape in all available Android clients. Even without e2e encryption enabled. Is it good now?

For Android - Conversations is in a very good shape now.