I selfhost since so long that some of my domains could vote, but I still need some "mainstream" channels to be reached by several people.

If we can argue that close friends will put extra effort to contact you on whatever you use, it's also true that your landlord, the plumber, the chick you picked up last night, won't give a shit and simply consider you a lunatic 99% of times if you tell them to use anything non-mainstream.

Ping me when you changed the world with whatever you are actually doing behind that keyboard

Masturbating, I'm masturbating. And so are you when you think that voting with your wallet does anything.

Lots of things have always had middlemen. Any sales representative you've ever encountered is a commission-driven middleman. Cars, insurance, housing, the guy at the phone store - they all exist solely to make money doing what a well made website is valuable of. If a company has a sales team, they ate unnecessary middlemen.

I agree the examples are all over the place.

I drive a pre-online car I can fix with the help of a friend, PC is Linux mint, laptop is Mac but highly restricted. My android device is silent, my iPhone is used for work only. My music is ripped and downloaded.

Masturbating, I’m masturbating.

Wow! Do it in public fully naked with the reasons of the protest tattooed on your body. You may hit the news and reach lots of people!

We (mostly my brother and I) convinced our octogenarian parents to switch the whole family group to Signal, many years ago. It works nicely. What saddens me though, is that Signal will never replace WA for most people, it's Just One More App for them.

help desk -> sysadmin -> CISO -> goat farmer

The comic is hyperbolic and not in a good way. "They wouldn't like it" - yeah, if millions of Americans did the same. And it isn't even necessary to go pre-digital or pre-internet to "cut out the middleman".

I agree with you on most, but this:

which includes driving a gas guzzler from the 70s, apparently?

is hyperbole on your part.

First of all, by-default internet connected cars haven't been a thing until relatively recently (10 years max I guess). And then, gas guzzling does not necessarily correlate with age. Cars consuming less than, say, 5l/100km have existed since at least the 80s (1st hand experience, and the car was already 20 years old at that point).

telemetry ... cell connection

When did this start to be a standard feature anyhow, and how does adoption track across brands & timeline?

Same here, mine is 2006 and already quite computerized for my taste.

But recently I did a trip in a 2020s car and it was ... disconcerting. First of all it was automatic which I'm not used to. Unable to get it in gear, the 9yo boy in the backseat said: look at the screen, it's telling you what to do!. He was right. Even so the car would not let me back into a patch of high grass, kept blocking the wheels. Jarringly.

In the EU, cars have to be equipped with automatic emergency call systems since 2018. So probably since then most brands will have had it, as they are required to have cell connection hardware anyway.

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We don't need to go back to handwritten mail, FOSS is the way to go.

Writing someone a letter is a very personal thing and you're creating a memory. Something tangible, concrete, also weighs in on reality. Looking at a piece of paper with your handwrite makes you understand you're commiting to something.

I'm a FOSS loon but the craze of making everything digital is absurd. I've listened to people criticizing others for using paper and a pencil to take down a memo, note or even journaling, when they can do it on their phone.

Is existing so dreadful nowadays? Does the notion of leaving proof of existence scares?

This is why I never gave up on DVDs, even though people would laugh. As soon as Prime shoehorned ads in the middle of a show or movie, that's when I cancelled. I'll have to do the same with music and get my iPod battery fixed up if I can.

Its nothing to do with contempt for the media, or not wanting to leave evidence of my existence or anything like that, its just that I got shit to do.