Post #3300797

This is my current pragmatic privacy stack. I am happy with where it sits. It is mostly sovereign, some necessary compromises. Note: There is no right answer here. I am not telling you what to do. I am only sharing my experience after spending the last couple of years taking back my sovereignty. Wins: Linux was my gateway drug. CachyOS + kernel tweaks keep me in control without losing convenience. Self hosting on two homelab nodes lets me experiment freely. Proton replaced 90% of my Google dependency (Mail, Drive, Pass, Calendar), making deGoogling actually feasible. Home Assistant and Jellyfin are zero enshittification, no subs, no PLEX bloat. Unhappy Middle: Search is still a headache. DuckDuckGo feels like a fallback, not a solution. Metager is better but paying for search rubs me wrong. Web registration is sloppy right now (Porkbun/Cloudflare mix) need to audit that. DNS is mostly Quad9 out of laziness. Pi-hole or AdGuard is next on the list. And yes, Discord is back. Trying to get friends onto Matrix or Signal feels like herding cats, some bridges are too far burned to cross. Hard Acceptances: I’m not running GrapheneOS (bootloader locked on my Pixel 10 Pro XL). I accept Steam, Obsidian, and Discord as permanent fixtures. And honestly, Google Maps and YouTube aren't going anywhere either. The convenience to privacy ratio just doesn't tip the scale there. You trade purity for functionality sometimes, and that’s okay. Next: Fixing DNS, auditing registrars, and maybe finally ripping those blurays into Jellyfin properly. Privacy isn’t binary. It’s a spectrum of control we fight for each day. #Privacy #DeGoogle #DigitalSovereignty #CachyOS #HomeLab #FOSS #Proton #Jellyfin #Mastodon