A lot of these “privacy sensitive” service providers are actually quite user-hostile.

Find a middle ground - get your own domain (pick a good registrar) and find a respectable mail host that has a support team with accountability who don’t treat you like a burden on this planet when you attempt to contact them (i.e not Tuta, not Mailbox-org - nope!!!, not Proton etc.). Do not go overboard with DMARC/etc in the beginning. Go about it slowly.

Also - make sure you use a service that lets you connect via an IMAP/POP client. It pains me to say that, but if you start avoiding services based on “five eyes” and “14 eyes” and “195 eyes”, I’m pretty sure we will be looking at pigeons and corked bottles in the sea. So, if you need E2EE over email - please use E2EE in the email using GPG on your own. I’d highly recommend not falling for the privacy theatre of the likes of Proton.

It’s one of those organic produce items among the Internet things which happens to be in vogue these days.

• By forcing you to use a non-anonymous Google Account.
• Then tying it with Google Play Services on that device.
• Google Play Services are like a combo of arteries and nerves of Android OS.

That’s how.

That’s the opposite of minimalism, I’d argue. I would consider minimalism as: having less, keeping/retaining less, and also, and in my opinion – more important, doing less.

Simplenote, DayOne, Pocket Casts are already ready to challenge this failure - maybe not in terms of money, Matt. So never say never.

No, I am afraid it’s not. Just because it has a clear one pricing doesn’t make it cheaper. One barely buys a VPN for one or just seven months or so.

I would assume that they mean ‘VPN not for anonymity’ when they say that. I agree with you though.

The thing is that 10 min search results in - trust all of them, trust none of them. A lot of folks also have affordability issues. So that makes this issue even more complex. When they turn a bit more “respected” forums they are told to “self host” or are given recommendations that they already knew of but couldn’t afford. So the problem lives on. All this lead to shady and heavy marketing VPNs come to the front.

With the phone number, no; and since there’s no Signal usage without a phone number, well…. Also, I think somewhere on their website (or some place) they talked about burner phones as if it’s a universal phenomena.

Signal has felt “out of place” to me. Odd. It doesn’t fit in, doesn’t make sense if I think a bit farther about it.

I hope something decentralised comes out of Signal protocol minus the need for a phone number.

Because on every occasion – at least in the case of Signal – they tried to switch, it was a far inferior experience for them, and the leadership behind the app/service took such puritanical decisions that it became evident that the ideology was more important than the people those tools were supposed to help/protect. I don’t even bother asking my friends now. In fact, now, for me as well, those (Signal, Matrix, etc.) are just things collecting dust on my spare phone.