Yeah that is quite the reality check… honestly thanks for being blunt. I spent way too many years writing tech support manuals and documentation so that “teacher voice” is basically burned into my brain at this point. I definitely see how the fancy formatting appears now. From now on I’ll just talk like I don’t know how 2 spekl

Look, man, you can keep checking my syntax all night, but at the end of the day, I’m just a guy in Canada who checked the news and saw something terrible happen and thought how we could prevent something like this from happening again.

I wrote that post because I was genuinely curious (and maybe a little bit desperate) to know if I was feeling alone in this. I wanted to know if other people saw the same connection between the data we give away and the way it’s being used as a weapon. And more importantly, how we proceed moving forwards as people and a community, not for silly reasons you’d likely suspect from a bad actor. I do get where you come from though, this is going to be my final word on this matter. Now, I’m going to stop arguing about my sentence structure and continue actually helping people build

You caught me. My “malicious agenda” is… convincing people to use encryption and local storage so that no one (not Google, not the feds, and certainly not me) can see their data.

Think about the logic for a second. If I’m a “government actor” trying to find people with “anti-government sentiments,” why would I come to a sub literally dedicated to digital sovereignty? That’s like a cop going to a shooting range to find people who own guns. Everyone here already fits your description. I’m not “preaching” to find new people; I’m here because this community has the skills to actually build the alternatives we need.

As for the AI post/Human response thing: I wrote a long, structured post because I wanted it to be a manifest, not a chat log. My responses are shorter because I’m now typing them on my phone while reading people call me a bot.

If you’re so worried about me being a “liar with an agenda,” then don’t trust me. Trust the code. Go install CasaOS, pull the Immich image from GitHub, audit the source if you have the skills, and run it on a machine with no phone home. That’s the whole point of self-hosting. Even if I were the shadiest person on earth, the software I’m recommending is designed so that it doesn’t matter who I am.

Now, can we get back to the actual work?

I’m a “malicious actor” because I’m telling people to stop giving their data to big tech and hide it on a local server? That is the least efficient data collection scam in history. If I wanted your data, I’d tell you to sign up for a “Free Privacy Newsletter” on a Google Form. Telling you to run an encrypted Vaultwarden instance literally locks me out too.

Slow down, guy. You’re spiraling.

I’m a former tech support guy who worked for a muncipal fiber network and spent 5 years volunteering with seniors. If my writing sounds “structured,” it’s because I’ve spent my entire adult life explaining complex tech to people who didn’t grow up with it. You learn to use bullet points and clear if/then logic because that’s how you get people to actually understand things.

And the fed accusation? Think about it for two seconds. If I were a government agent trying to collect data, why on earth would I be telling people to move their passwords to a local Vaultwarden instance and their photos to an encrypted Immich box behind a Tailscale VPN? That’s literally the opposite of data collection lmao

It’s hard to call it anything else when you see the actual human cost on the street. But the most “antagonistic” thing we can do right now isn’t just venting, it’s making surveillance models obsolete.

I am genuinely new to this platform and form of social media. Am trying my best to keep this to the conversation.

@PhoenixAlpha I’ll be sure to tell my 10th-grade English teacher that her lessons on rhetorical devices are now considered hallucinations. If “not X, but Y” makes me a bot, then half the op-ed columnists in history are running on silicon.

As for the Renee Good shooting, if you think the infrastructure of surveillance, license plate readers, and cross-referenced databases “had nothing to do” with how ICE operates in a city like Minneapolis, then you’re missing the forest for the trees. I’m not here to win a Turing test; I’m here because I’m tired of seeing tech used as a weapon, you know?

I’m definitely a human, just a concerned poster who actually gives a damn about what’s happening to our digital privacy.

I’ll take the “AI” comments as a compliment to my grammar, I guess, but it’s a bit sad that we’ve reached a point where structured thoughts and bullet points make people suspicious. I use the dashes and lists because I want this info to be readable, not because I’m a bot running on a server somewhere.

I’ve spent enough time working in tech and volunteering with seniors to know that if you don’t lay things out clearly, the message gets lost. I’m just someone trying to help people get their tech privacy back. No LLM required. Just a lot of caffeine and a genuine annoyance with where Big Tech is heading.

You’re right that Google’s infrastructure is more hardened than individual deployments. But security and sovereignty are different problems. Google’s security protects against external threats, it’s designed to be transparent to Google and compliant with government requests. Your email experience actually proves my point: hobbyist sysadmins running free services for friends doesn’t work. I agree completely. What I’m proposing is professional infrastructure for organizations that actually need it; small businesses, non-profits, community orgs. Not favors for friends who don’t care. Not trying to out-secure Google. Just viable alternatives for entities where corporate access to their data is a real threat, not a theoretical privacy concern. The non-profit handling immigrant legal aid? The community health clinic? They need this. Your friends checking Gmail don’t.

You’re right that if the state really wants you, they can always resort to physical force, but that’s exactly the point. In the current system, they don’t have to kick down any doors, they just send a silent request to a corporate office and get everything they need without you or your neighbors ever knowing. Forcing them to physically show up at a specific address in the real world drastically changes the “cost of surveillance,” it turns a cheap, automated dragnet into a slow, expensive, and public operation.

As for the Hillary Clinton example, that’s actually a perfect lesson in what happens when you prioritize convenience over security. Her setup was “shadow IT” at its worst, it had open ports, unencrypted connections, and none of the basic hardening we use in modern sovereign stacks like Docker or NixOS. It wasn’t built for resistance, it was built to bypass government record-keeping, and that lack of professionalism is exactly why it failed.

The “Amazon engineer” might only see bytes, but the Amazon algorithm sees your entire life story, your politics, and your vulnerabilities. If we use end-to-end encryption, it doesn’t matter if the guy hosting the box is a neighbor or a stranger, they can’t read the data anyway. We aren’t just following random guides, we are building professional-grade infrastructure that makes the “dragnet” fail by design. If the state has to kick down a door for one person’s data, the system is at least forced to follow a transparent process again.

Actually, you’re exactly right about client-side encryption being the answer, and that is the standard we are pushing for. But the reason you don’t just dump those encrypted files into a Google Drive is because of the metadata. Even if Google cannot read your “letter,” they are still mining the “envelope,” they know when you wrote it, where you were, and who you sent it to. In 2026, metadata is often more dangerous than the content itself because it is so easy to automate into a threat profile.

As for the law, you’re right that a court order is a court order, but there is a massive difference in the “cost of surveillance.” Big tech companies have dedicated departments to automate data handovers for thousands of users at a time; it is a streamlined pipeline. A private server forces the state to slow down, to get a specific warrant for a specific physical machine, and to actually do the legwork. It turns a massive dragnet into a targeted investigation, which is exactly how the system is supposed to work.

And regarding the “Amazon engineer” versus a neighbor, an engineer might not know my name, but the Amazon algorithm knows my pulse, my politics, and my habits better than anyone. If I use E2EE, the person hosting the hardware doesn’t have the keys anyway, so they are just a landlord for my digital safe, not a spy.

You nailed it, the “I’m not techy” thing is often just a shield people use because they are simply exhausted by this economy, and time is the one resource Big Tech steals that we can’t ever get back. I’ve spent a lot of time teaching seniors at a library program, and I’ve seen firsthand how that “convenience” is a trap designed to keep people from even looking under the hood to see what’s actually happening to their data.

You are right about the remote admin headache too, that’s exactly why the movement needs to shift from just “hobbyist favors” to actual, reliable infrastructure that doesn’t break every time an adult in the house clicks a link. If we don’t make these sovereign nodes as easy as a light switch, people will always fall back into the arms of a corporation just to get through their Monday. We have to be the ones who put in the work to make the “resistance” feel like less of a chore and more like a utility.

That means a lot, the force multiplier thing is exactly why I posted this. Building for yourself is a great start, but bringing others along with you is how we actually scale the resistance. We need more nodes in the network, so keep doubling down.

That’s a big question because individual action only goes so far before you hit a wall, for the heavy-duty legal and policy stuff, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is still the gold standard, and I really respect The Calyx Institute for actually providing hardware and internet access that doesn’t track you. Also look at Tactical Tech, they do amazing work on digital literacy for activists, and the Matrix.org Foundation is building the actual backbone for the communication side.

But honestly, I think the most important “organizations” are the ones we haven’t built yet, the local community networks where people help their neighbors get off the corporate grid. My time teaching at the library with a digital literacy program for seniors taught me that we need people who can translate this tech into something a regular person can actually use, so the movement needs to be as much about education as it is about code, we have to be the infrastructure we want to see, one node at a time.

You’re hitting on the two biggest myths of the current era: that “legal agreements” with giants actually protect you, and that a neighbor is a bigger risk than a faceless corporation.

First, when a tech giant gets a broad subpoena, they don’t fight it for you; they automate the handover because you’re just a line in a database of billions. When you host locally, you’re a specific node. If the state wants your data from a private server, they have to physically knock on a specific door. That is a massive increase in the “cost of surveillance” compared to a silent API request sent to a corporate data center.

Second, this isn’t about “trusting a neighbor” with your plaintext data. In a proper sovereign setup, the data is end-to-end encrypted. I can host your Vaultwarden or your Nextcloud backups, but I don’t have the keys; I’m just providing the “digital real estate.” It’s the difference between giving someone your house keys and just letting them provide the land your safe sits on.

The goal isn’t to make law enforcement impossible; it’s to make the “dragnet” impossible. If they want one person’s data, they have to work for it, rather than just pulling it from a corporate warehouse.

You’re right. We’ve been traded convenience for our autonomy for way too long, and it’s created this massive power imbalance where a few tech bros basically own the digital roads we walk on. Voting with your wallet is a huge first step, but like you said, the real work starts when we actually take responsibility for our own data.

That’s exactly why I’m moving toward helping local businesses and groups build out their own nodes. It’s one thing to stop paying for a subscription, but it’s another thing entirely to stand up your own infrastructure that doesn’t report back to a corporate mother-ship. Every person who rejects the “default” and builds a private alternative is a small win for the rest of us, it’s about making the corporate extraction model fail by simply making it unnecessary.

Honestly, you’re right about the skill gap, the convenience trap is exactly how Big Tech won in the first place, but I don’t think the goal is to turn every single person into a sysadmin. My time teaching at the library with the Cyber Seniors program showed me that people don’t need to know how to flash an OS to deserve privacy, they just need a doorway that isn’t owned by a corporation.

If the 5% who actually know how this stuff works start building “community nodes” for their family, their block, or a local shop, then the 95% get all the benefits without the technical headache. We don’t need everyone to be an expert, we just need enough local infrastructure so that “the cloud” isn’t the only option left. It’s not about total purity for everyone, it’s just about building enough exit ramps so the machine becomes optional, you know?

I feel this deeply. I used to volunteer at a library teaching “Cyber Seniors” digital literacy, and the biggest hurdle was always the fear of “breaking” something. The truth is, the big tech companies want you to think it’s too hard so you’ll keep paying them with your data.

You don’t need to be a sysadmin to start. It’s not about days of fixing errors; it’s about taking one small win at a time; like setting up a password manager first. If you can follow a recipe, you can build a node. We’re working on better, no-jargon guides to make sure the “thousand little errors” don’t stand in your way. You don’t have to be an expert to be part of the resistance.

Spot on. Self-hosting is the most effective form of quiet, material protest we have. Every time your family uses Syncthing instead of OneDrive, you’re starving the machine of the telemetry it needs to function.

Running that stack for your inner circle is essentially building a “digital mutual aid” node. You’re taking the burden of surveillance off their backs and putting it on your own hardware where you can actually defend it. That’s the work.