EMAIL PROVIDERS:

1. Posteo - Their choice of domain
2. Mailbox - Custom domain

DEFINITELY FREE TIERS:

3. GMX - Apparently has ads
4. Zoho - Business focused
5. Proton - Feels walled garden-esque, has one email for free

That’s going to be very interesting with persistent spam senders.

Proton allows only one free email address, which is what taught me to be wary of unexpected restrictions on services. I’ve got to say the only one I trust fully is my own, with complete certainty of security and features are all only limited by the hardware. Whenever someone talks about paying per month to get more addresses, aliases, calendar or storage - nah. Self-host. DuckDuckGo email is a good firewall layer as well - it forwards all mail to your chosen actual address after trying its best to strip the mail of trackers.

Yo I just wish you could opt out of government ownership

This. Why pay £6/m when, with self-hosting a Samba/NFS/NextCloud instance, I pay a fraction of the corporate cost.

Currently I’m paying ~£15/m as my server now has a GPU for better streaming and local assistant purposes. It uses ~80W. Without the GPU I was paying ~£4.50/m, which gets me:

• Network-wide traffic protection, ads, spam etc.
• Hub to remotely control, secure and automate my home
• Cloud media, frequently synced between devices
• CCTV
• Password management
• Email
• Notekeeping
• Instant messaging
• Streaming for locally stored movies, shows, music, podcasts, books, audio books and YouTube subscriptions
• Multiplayer Minecraft server
• Website/blogsite
• Remote desktop access
• Group video calling/presentation hosting
• 54TB shared storage between everything
• Network-attached storage

Imagine the cost of outsourcing all these services for unlimited access, unlimited* storage, unlimited e-mailboxes, and complete independence** from outside influence. I know I’d be paying £8/m to Google for their 2TB media storage plan alone.

*Limited by the drives you can afford
**Relying only on the developers of the software
It cost approx. £200 for the base parts, £200 for the GPU and £900 for the hard drives. A valuable investment.

I’ve worked out that I’ve had the server running for 3 years. If I take into account the money I have saved by not paying Google £8/m, I’ve saved £40/year. If I account for Netflix £25/m, I’ve completely covered the £900 I spent on storage. Disney+ £15/m takes me well over the remaining hardware costs. The media I own is far less than that offered by streamers but it’s everything I can need for the next 20 years+. I’ve counted. Every other service is just a bonus.

That’s Google’s standard and has been for a long time on their services, most Androids and Windows. Saying no to personalised ads doesn’t mean you’re saying no to ads, it means getting ads that aren’t filtered to the genre you respond to. If you use a stock-OS Android it might be worth deleting your ad profile in the Play Store app every now and then.

Fun fact, if you don’t give them a locale (for example, when setting up spyware such as Win11, for language and keyboard choose global, and for timezone choose UTC) they can’t give you a large portion of their bloat.

It’s owned by Amazon. A no brainer to avoid, really

Son of a… Thank you! Time to reassess my server aha

As in, backup messages to import into new clients? Is that possible?

What is keeping you all from extreme stress considering

Not being prone to paranoia, as unhelpful as that is

I’m also a realist, which keeps my expectations in check.

Remember that you are one person. Nobody in government censorship or reconnaissance of the public cares about you enough to spy or hack you. You alone aren’t worth the effort or resources.

Remember to play. Go outside for a walk, meditate, consume entertaining non-toxic, non-fiction media, have sex or masturbate. All work and no play makes Ringpop a dull person.

Don’t forget that OMEMO on XMPP has no backward decryption - all messages are lost with every new client. Massive dealbreaker for me, as I value message history between those I love.

I’ve gone for Matrix. Signal doesn’t interest me until they get rid of the requirement for phone numbers.

Others have noted that XMPP servers hold user contacts (and maybe other parts) wholly unencrypted, and if the server isn’t yours, that’s a trust risk.

As I’ve seen gaming server subscriptions go from £36/y to £23/m (Xbox) in a few years, and cloud CCTV storage from £40/y to £16/m (Google via acquisition of Nest) in a few months, I say we count our stars when a subscription cost remains fair.

What country did you last have issues with? I’ll try it out. I use Nord for downloading videos, and it seems that YT have flagged every single Dutch and UK IP I try as a potential bot, restricting access completely without being logged in.

There also seems to be a huge issue where YouTube has recently delisted a significant amount of videos - and I don’t mean unlisted or private. I mean they just don’t exist through channels or yt-dlp any more. I think YT is killing creators

I haven’t seen the lights go red, only off, then orange, then green if they were already on.

Of my KP105 and KP115 plugs, only one has misbehaved, only once when their server was unreachable. The main culprit is the Kasa 303 I think it’s called? The 3-outlet adapter.

They are great devices! But I’m waiting for a Zigbee or Matter alternative with energy monitoring so these can be swapped out

Well, TP Link have never been trustworthy. Cheap and trustworthy rarely exist together.

I have the best smart plugs I could acquire - Kasa brand. They’re great adapters, but the moment their API call doesn’t get a response from their servers, they restart themselves every ten minutes. We all have to make some sacrifices in the journey to net security and independence, and keeping their API unblocked is one of mine.

If anyone wants smart plugs for monitoring purposes the Kasa brand is operable without the TP-Link app. Tapo is far worse. Never go full Tapo.

I hear you. I’ve taken to writing myself guides on how to set up things based on what worked for me, in case I need to again, purely because of how complicated each one is. Might write blogs later aha

Yeah, the way things at going I feel like I should protect myself further with a VPN, but it does break some of my services’ access. Just another hurdle in the track to net independence that will be overcome! Heaven knows we’ve overcome many to get where we each are.

No need to bust your brain trying too hard - you’ll find an answer eventually!

Welp, I’ve been anti-authoritarian ever since I learned what it was, but this is the moment I will actively reject the UK government. They’re finally coming to directly interfere with my life. I’ll never work at companies that conform to this as long as it’s in place, and I urge others to do the same.

Rip. I use AgentDVR for security and they do the same thing, but at least with camera footage you don’t want that to be external