The good news is that there are enough people feeling this that refuges from the enshittification are growing. We’re in one right now.

Also, while online personal computing has definitely been getting worse, offline personal computing is better than it’s ever been. Growing that is sort of like making your own walled garden.

That all said, only keep to technology as much as it improves your life. The other people saying to go into nature more have it right.

I cycle through phrases just because language variety also matters. I’m fighting myself not to edit a recent comment because I used “still” twice in one sentence. Lol.

Lol. I use hedging terms constantly, because I’m autistic and precision in language matters to me. 99% certainty is still enough uncertainty to justify a “likely.” I’m not planning to change that even if more and more people think my writing is AI.

I’ve got similar requirements, and I’m still at least partially on Keep due to them. So far, the closest thing I’ve seen is Quillpad, and being able to stack it with Obsidian is an attractive feature, but the lack of nested checklists is a deal breaker for a few of my use cases.

And yes, I hate apps wanting to auto-categorize things for me, groceries, banking transactions, etc. I do 99% of my grocery shopping at one store, so I have a dedicated shopping list for it with categories set up to match the easiest path through the store that hits everything.

It’s crazy to me that there aren’t enough people living like that to make solutions for it ubiquitous…

It was mentioned. I remember a “Patriot or Traitor?” headline, so the news was at least charitable enough to throw the first option in. Honestly, it’s probably more that I just wasn’t following the news as much then.

Thanks! I assume you’re in Australia from your instance. I’m in the US. On top of using American companies just being a given here, let’s just say the coverage of Snowden in 2013 was inadequate in my circles at the time.

Funnily enough, I’ve thought of the cloud as “someone else’s computer” from the beginning and shun using it more than everyone else I know, but I was just getting into the space when Gmail and Chrome were the hot new things, each gradual step into the ecosystem didn’t feel like a big concession, and I was too young to know to question the convenience.

In case it wasn’t clear, reversing those two decades of inertia and tech debt is what I was referring to as the time-consuming bit. So far, what I’ve finished switching over is actually quite nice to use.

And yes, I dread the day even the fallback options start getting killed off. It’s always one bad law away.

Yeah, technology enshittification as a whole has definitely picked up the last few years, and I find myself compromising more and more as the field of reasonable options gets narrower.

Like you, I used to only go for phones with SD card and headphone jack support. Now, I’m on a (new but not bought from Google) Pixel 9 Fold with GrapheneOS using a DAC adapter to still have wired audio and a more deliberate storage management system to compensate for not having SD cards. (Unlike you, I need a big screen for spreadsheets and such.)

I purposely bought the newest phone I could within my budget, because I’m planning for Android to be completely unviable the next time I need to upgrade, and I want to give Linux phones as much time to mature as possible before I inevitably migrate.

It seems offline tech is going to be the last bastion of safety sooner rather than later, so I’m in various stages of migrating my digital life offline. Linux over Windows. Keepass, LibreOffice, Obsidian, etc. + Syncthing over cloud options. Keeping off-site backups with friends and family instead of in the cloud. Keeping local DRM-free media. It’s time-consuming but rewarding. I should have done it all way sooner.