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Rambler wrote

Will this ever end? Will I ever have a computer that I own?

Honestly? Probably not. Not unless we could get some major player like Musk to take a high interest in digital privacy and the wealth he has to produce secure hardware at a rate that it'd be cost effective for someone like your or me to own. And then, what? Most anonymity networks are simple overlays to the modern internet. Your ISP knows you're connected to Tor, but don't know what you're doing (Unless you used Brave for the long time they were leaking your requests to ISPs then you're fucked).

I'd like to see widescale deployments of meshnets, and more localized networks. Sure, I may not be able to communicate directly with someone on the other side of the world but I could check the weather from someone's local weather station, could share movies/files/music with others in the town/city, discuss local politics (which honestly, is more important than national politics. Change happens at the local level, and over time, upward).

Having many, many smaller, localized mesh-nets is one potential solution, assuming there was no direct connection to the clearnet and some fancy routing done to hide the origin of requests on that mesh-net.

I'm not sure what a good solution would be really. I could live without on-demand access to the reactionary comments on political articles from people who only read the headlines, I could live without the self-gratification of a new notification on social media (Of which I've long abandoned, with reddit being the last remaining one I keep active). I could even live without the ability to post comments like this to you, who I assume is geographically far away from me even. And I'd be happy to, if it meant total privacy, freedom from manipulative algorithms to showcase results catered to me, to escape from the fight to control the narrative and the way the populace thinks about certain subjects.

It's all mind numbing, depressing and an uphill battle.

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BlackWinnerYoshi wrote

To be honest, I don't think Elon Musk will help us having a computer that you own (so not owned by big corporations), and I think so because he already recommended Signal (wants your phone number, and it's also not decentralized like XMPP, so it died after his recommendation) and Bitcoin (not anonymous by default, unlike Monero). The only thing that can save us is, well, ourselves, trying to kill capitalism. That way, having "a computer that is designed largely to maximize the profits of the computer industry" won't be possible. About the anonymity networks, yes, most of them just overlay the clear net, and so they're easy to block, like it happened to Tor in Venezuela (clear net only).

I agree, meshnets like ZeroNet, RetroShare, Tor, IPFS, should be more popular. Maybe localized networks should too because you could, like you have given as an example, share data from your personal weather station.

About mesh-nets that have no direct connections, Freenet is the solution (and our hope) for that because, if I remember correctly, doesn't connect to the clear net (unless you choose to download its updates through the clear net, for some reason).

Also, I don't really think it's possible (or it's just me) to live without technology. Sure, you can limit its usage (like by not having home assistants or IoTs), and yes, technology is filled with privacy violations, manipulating algorithms, narrative control, but it's clear that life would be hard without search engines, web browsers, and communicators.

So, I think that as a TL;DR to this: the solution to having a computer you own (as well as other problems) is to kill capitalism.

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