I think that i started to feel this in the years of Reagan’s presidency (I lived and worked in Europe in those days). Still a little hidden then, it seems to be blatantly obvious now, they no longer try to hide it.

For important data, I have around 100 GB in an AWS bucket, all encrypted backups (moved away from Dropbox a few years back). It costs me about €5 or 6 per month. Thinking about moving them to a European provider, though not sure where to as yet. Less important data stay local on external disks.

What would be the motivation to switch to doas? DT gave no reason for why he did all this?

I use a SIP phone service now (zadarma.com). They have an app for Android, and it also works with the SIP clients on my Linux desktop. Can’t give a longtime review of them yet, as i am a Skype “victim” too, but so far so good.

I think there is another messenger called Viber that can call landlines, but it looked a little sketchy to me.

I think, the “threadiverse” is more akin to the old (also federated, just in a different way) Usenet / Newsgroups than web-forums. So “ScoopGroups”, maybe?

Melania is Eastern European, so likely catholic I guess. And less than 80 years old, so would qualify, if they bend the rules just a little?

Back in the mid 2000s, we (my company) were on Windows, including three Windows 2000 Server licences. And we needed to upgrade. But it wasn’t sustainable for the small company to pay for all these licences, when a free option was available.

So we slowly moved all applications over to cross-platform alternatives, Outlook to Thunderbird (called Firebird in those days), office to OpenOffice (now LibreOffice), Internet Explorer to Firefox, Corel Draw to Gimp, Company software like accounting to a XAMPP stack etc.

Once this was established and running well, we just changed the underlying platform from Windows to Ubuntu/Gnome, cursed for a few days and went on with our lives. And it worked for the past 20 years and counting. Now I am cursing, when I am forced to use Windows and can’t find my butt using it.

So the mindset, if you want, was that of methodical planning and going slow, step by step. This is likely different if you’re a gamer, or you need some very specialised apps, but for me, this was not the case. The games that I play, like Sudoku and Solitaire, work on any platform.