Private Communications

All the communication tools provided on this server or recommended by me are private with minor exceptions described. If you do not want corporations, governments, and AI monitoring and controlling you, you should understand the below basic concepts to choose the right methods.

Encryption

Private communications means that only you and the person you are communicating with can see the messages. This is accomplished through encryption. Encryption locks the message data in patterns that can only be unlocked with keys to prevent anybody reading it on its journey.

All communications on this server are encrypted from and to the server. If E2EE (End to End Encryption) is used, message data stored on the server can not be seen by the server administrator.

If you are using a server of someone you do not know or trust and especially a big centralized one, communications should be E2EE. Even if it is E2EE, metadata is created..

Metadata

Metadata is data about data. All digital messages have metadata such as sender, receiver, time, message size, IP address, and device. Some metadata is always created for any communication service, and that can be monitored. Whatsapp and its parent company Meta/Facebook learn much about people by knowing who talks to whom how often and for how long even though it is E2EE.

This data is valuable when collected for massive amounts of people or requested by a government. A service that stores as little metadata as possible or stores it spread out on small servers leaves less to be monitored.

I do not monitor any metadata unless I need to fix or clean up something. You know me and can ask yourself WTF would I do with a few people's activity logs and why would I care?

Decentralization and Federation

All communication methods provided here are decentralized.

Centralized services, AKA platforms, create a single point of control that can and usually are abused. For example, WhatsApp is controlled, monitored, censored, and data harvested by a single massive ad tech company and under the control of government. When a service is decentralized into many perhaps thousands of nodes, no single corporation or government can violate our interests with surveillance and censorship. This makes decentralized services more resistant to both surveillance and censorship.

Federation is what allows the decentralized nodes to communicate with each other using common protocols. Email is federated to allow a message from Protonmail to reach a mailbox on Tutanota server. Federation and decentralization are essential to freedom.

Read further items in this section for solutions.

Credential and password management is one of the most important security practices. Many people learn the hard way after their accounts are breached or their information is sold off to nefarious companies and governments. Prevent yourself from being a victim.

Here are some guidelines

• Use a unique strong password for each online account.
• Use a unique username and email addresses for each account.
• Use a different credit card for each account that requires one.
• Use a separate phone number for accounts you do not want tied to your real identity.

Online services are breached every day with the data sold to anybody who will pay for it. Data brokers legally buy up and collect data from many services. If your credentials are unique to each site, your individual damage is limited to that service. Hackers cannot use the info from one breach to breach your other accounts, and data brokers cannot match up the data from other accounts to add to your dossier that they sell on to advertisers and government agencies.

Password Managers

Some of us can have hundreds of different accounts. So it is impossible to remember the unique usernames, complex passwords, and email addresses used for each. This is where a good password manager is very important. You could write everything down on a piece of paper that you hide someplace safe but that can be inconvenient and have other problems. A password manager is software that will allow you to remember only one password to access all your safely stored credentials. Here are some I recommend:

Email Management

This is a good document, but my summary is below.

Your email address is often a real identification of who you are. You may choose to provide real identification email addresses to some accounts you trust such as your bank, but for most accounts, it is best to provide anonymous unique addresses. You can maintain a single email inbox with many aliases these ways:

• Buy a domain at a registrar such as Njalla (anonymous), Gandi or Porkbun. Then create a catchall forward to your inbox. I will give you a free subdomain from one of mine if you just ask me and give me the email address to which to forward.

• https://simplelogin.io/ or Anonaddy.com provide alias management for a small fee.

• Your email inbox provider might provide you with alias services. Fastmail.com, proton.me, tuta.net, and other private email services have this built in. If you are using an email service supported by advertising which you are not paying for, it is probably not private. See the Be Not Beholden document for more on email

Credit Cards

I use and recommend https://privacy.com to create a virtual card for every account. I don't need to give vendors my real name or address either. It has other features such as setting limits and easy cancellation of the card that helps with sneaky subscription services that make it difficult to cancel. 

Phone Numbers

If you give a company your real phone number, they know who is associated to that number unless that number. This is one way they try to identify you. I have several phone numbers. I will give you a phone number to use for SMS verifications and even calls if you want it. The SMS can simply forward to your email inbox if you give me the email address to which to forward. They cost me something but not much.

More options if you want to setup your own number are found at https://kycnot.me. 

Multi-factor Authentication

This is also called two factor authentication. MFA requires you to also authenticate using a secondary device or app. You should use this when possible, especially for important accounts.

Imagine getting all your news, music, podcasts, videos, new releases, feeds from any website, posts from Twitter, Tiktok, Mastodon, Youtube and more all in a single app. Imagine having your subscriptions, notes, and viewing history synchronized to all your devices and apps. Imagine if you could get all of it with:

• no advertising
• no algorithmic censorship
• no account logon to corp/gov servers (anonymous)
• no installation of spyware on your devices.

Well you can!

Here is a great video explaining much of this.

Why You Would Want to Read This

Some say ignorance is bliss, but ignorant people are usually unhealthy, poor, and bad citizens. Some say what you don't know won't hurt you, but what you don't know can kill you.

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past." -George Orwell

"He who controls the news controls the world." -Caitlin Johnstone

We rely on digital media for our understanding of the world beyond our immediate surroundings. Democracy dies in darkness. Maintaining and increasing wealth and health relies on being well informed. Sometimes we like some entertainment such as music, games, and video too.

Everything in the media is biased except the stock quotes and sports scores. Getting a broad perspective from multiple different sources is the best way to understand issues. Efficiently getting a wide range of news without being manipulated can be difficult.

This guide will help you to get a lot of information efficiently. If you want recommendations of sources of information, ask me. I am happy to help and share.

Typical Methods of Getting Media

News Sites

Most media organizations have a web page with many links to articles they publish.

Problems:

• One cannot be expected to open up every web page every day to peruse and consume the content. It takes too much time.

• Most of these web sites are full of hostile surveillance advertising and dark patterns.

News Aggregator Apps

Apps such as Apple News, Google News, MSN News, Feedly.. will gather stories from sources you choose onto a single feed.

Problems

• The sources available are often limited to mainstream corporate or government sources.

• These companies track what you read and what you follow to push advertising(manipulation) to you either in the app or elsewhere.

• These companies can manipulate your feeds and censor content or creators.

Corporate/Government Controlled Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, Youtube.. have been a great way to publish, share, and discuss issues.

Problems

• These platforms try to record pretty much everything you do to help them serve advertising(manipulation) and build a dossier on you.

• They share this information about you with nefarious agencies such as data brokers and governments.

• Censorship through algorithmic manipulation is rising. Content their advertisers or the government do not want seen will simply not appear in your feeds.

• Dark patterns are deployed to drive engagement and addiction.

The Game Changers: RSS and Free Social Media

RSS: Really Simple Syndication

RSS has been around for decades, but you may not have heard much about it because corporations and governments want to herd you into the above mentioned places. Like many free as in freedom methods and tools, no money is spent promoting it.

Most news sources have an RSS feed which you can put into an RSS feed reader to get unmanipulated unmonitored feeds that are generally free of advertising. You can get the mainstream corporate and government sources but also get independent press, Twitter posts, Youtube channels, podcasts, blogs, and more all in a single feed.

You can use any RSS reader client(app you install on your device), but if it is only on your device, it will not be synchronized to your other devices and you loose it if your device is lost or breaks. I use FreshRSS to synchronize apps on my PC and handset. Whether I read from https://ravergram.club/RSS, RSS Guard on my PC, or FreshRSS app on my handset, what I read, star, and organize is synchronized. It is on Ravergram which is safely away from any corporate or government view.

By getting your feed from this server rather than direct from sources to your device, you also obscure your IP address from the source. In other words, a source such as Youtube only sees feed traffic coming to my server and not to your house. If you open links in the feeds, then that traffic is directly connected to you unless you use TOR, I2P, or VPN.

Problems

• One needs to find the RSS feed for each source, but you can watch the video below for some tips.

• Some sources might post too frequently, but you can use 'Feed Reducer' in https://ravergram.club/rss-bridge/.

• Some feeds provide little information in the feed and require opening the site for meaningful content. See browser add ons below.

Step by Step Demonstration

The steps demonstrated in below videos are:

1. Find the RSS feed you want from searching or appending /RSS or /Feed to a site URL.

2. Generate feeds from other sources using RSS Bridge.

3. Copy and paste that RSS feed into FreshRSS or any RSS client you have synchronized with FreshRSS.

4. Create folders and organize your feeds.

5. Safely navigate to linked articles without advertising and paywalls.

📽️ Here are two videos: One showing setup on a big screen and one on a small screen. 

I mentioned mobile app for Youtube https://newpipe.net/

Useful Browser add ons in Firefox

Ublock Origin blocks surveillance advertising in both directions:   Here is a guide on how to best use it. And a more advanced one is here.

Bypass Paywalls If extension is not available for your browser, add https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters/-/raw/main/bpc-paywall-filter.txt to Ublock Origin filters. If you are unable to install extensions on your browser, you can use https://12ft.io/. 

Libredirect routes you to safe versions of popular sites.

Other RSS directories and tools

Blogs

Youtube without ads and tracking

If you created an account on https://invid.peoplever.se/, you can manage your subscriptions there and create a single RSS feed for all of your subscriptions.

Twitter without ads and tracking

Convert any email newsletters into RSS feeds

If you have any difficulty finding a feed for a source you want, chat me up on Talk. I am happy to help you find it.

Want a quick start? You can upload this sample OPML file of subscriptions to have a bunch of feeds. Remove everything you don't want and add more.

How do you discover great independent sources to add to your feed, and how do you share great articles you find?

Free Social Media

Social media is needed when you want to share and discuss articles or propaganda. The fediverse is a world of social media generally free of surveillance, advertising, and censorship as it is not controlled by any corporation or government. Your feeds of people you follow is simply chronological without any manipulation other than the filters and hashtags you configure. It is composed of thousands of server instances around the world using free software that all talk to each other. This makes it impervious to any central control and resistant to censorship. Each instance has moderators to ensure people follow the rules of its instance, but this is very different from corporate and government censorship. People can easily move their accounts from one instance to another whenever they want.

See the guide for social media

Final Notes and Advice

For ethical and other reasons, I do not to participate in corporate/government media, but everybody needs to choose their own path. If people start using and investing some time on free social media, it will grow faster. The first step is creating your account and sharing it with people who might want to follow you. You can use both corporate and free media simultaneously.

I have shown how to evade most surveillance advertising in news media. Unfortunately most of our media is funded this way and creates a corrupted system where the advertisers/corporations influence what we get. Independent media (not corporate or government influenced) sometimes uses advertising but mainly relies on us to fund them. When you find a good news outlet or creator, fund them or support them as directly as possible to reward them and keep them independent.

Who this is for

If you use platforms controlled by corporations or governments, you are at risk. For example, if your main email address is something like yourname@big_ad_tech_company.com and someone takes it over, the platform cancels it, or they do some other nasty things, how inconvenient would that be for you? This guide shows you how to prevent any such inconvenience and give you maximum freedom.

What Happens on Platforms

Platforms have a life cycle where they start off being very attractive and welcoming to people. After they have captured a critical mass and attain network effects, they start extracting value from these people to their real customers who are advertisers, data brokers, and governments. In the final stage, they also extract value from their customers. This is called enshitification.

You may not have experienced this yet, but many people have learned the hard way that corporate run platforms put profits before people and do what the government tells them. These platforms regularly ban or cancel accounts, discontinue services, raise fees, change the terms of service, censor speech, feed it to AI, or start filling the sites with hostile advertising and tracking. Governments also compel these companies to do things not in your interest. You usually have little to no recourse. It is unwise to become too dependent or hostage to these platforms. If your business is based on a platform, you are at greater risk.

If you are using any of the platforms such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft etc., ask yourself "What if they closed my account, and I lost all access?" If you would lose important connections or services you need, you are probably hostage. Hostages get abused because they are not free to push back.

Solution

This guide will show you how to mitigate this problem and put you more in control. You can then more safely use government/corporate platforms when needed. By owning a domain you control, people can find you where you want them to find you. If you must leave a platform by choice or by force, it is not such a big deal since people can easily know where to find you. You can also expand your own web site in any way you want.

This gives you the flexibility to leave a platform, adopt a new platform, create your own site, change your communication channels, and more.

This does not solve the problem with platforms. The solution to that is leaving platforms altogether and moving to decentralized instances connected by common protocols like we have here on Ravergram.club. 

Step 1: Register your own domain

Buy your own domain such as yourname.com at a domain registrar. Technically you are renting the rights to use the domain, but as long as you keep paying the generally low yearly fee, you have control of your digital identity.

Gandi.net is a good registrar that also provides email and other services. Many other registrars such as https://www.hover.com/, https://porkbun.com, and https://www.namecheap.com/ are available if you prefer.

Step 2: Create your page or full website

You can refer your domain to any site through your domain registrar. This site can have links to all the places where people can find you such as Linkedin, the fediverse and so forth. Here are a few options:

• Create a Linkstack page with all your links on one of these instances: https://linkstack.org/instances/.

• Create a free site at neocities, but you need to understand some HTML.

• Create a full website or blog and go as big as you want: You are lucky if you know someone hosting a server and willing to host your site. You can easily rent a VPS (virtual private server) from a company such as Hetzner, Digital Ocean, or many others. You can also own a small single board computer at your house and use https://yunohost.org.

This page you create is visible to anybody on the internet who searches for it. So make your own choices of what you want to display publicly. Once people contact you through private channels, you can steer them to the preferred anonymous channels.

Step 3: Email

This is optional but highly recommended. If you own a domain(s), you can have an email address that is independent of whoever is hosting your mailbox. This prevents you from being locked into any mail provider and locked out of accounts such as your bank if your email provider goes down or kicks you off. I also recommend using private email services which means that nobody but you can read your inbox. Advertising supported email services rely on others reading your email to serve you personalized ads.

• Proton, Fastmail, and Tutanota are some of the providers of private email that allow you to use your own domain.

Email Aliasing

Do not give companies your real email address if you can avoid it. You can use an email aliasing solution from your mail provider, Simplelogin, or Anonaddy. You can also buy a domain and create a catch all forward. Njal.la is good for anonymous domains. These all forward to your mailbox but don't reveal your real identity to those companies and data brokers. Ideally give every company a different email alias to protect yourself from spam, breaches, and data brokers.

Gradually replace your @adtechcompany.com email address with either aliases for subscriptions/purchases or your @yourname.com email address for important accounts like banking and your friends and family.

Step 4: Share your domain with people

Whenever you want to share contacts with someone, simply give them your domain/site name. Because the page contains all the ways you want them to reach you, it is all they need store in their address book. You can change the content of this page and the ways to contact you any time you want without the need for them to update anything. You can easily generate a QR code for your site and save it on your phone for people you meet in person.

Do you want to throw a party or other event but don't want to invite Facebook, advertisers, and government agencies to the event? Here are a few options:

Private Bin with Discussion

See the documentation here.

Cryptpad Document and/or form

Anybody can create E2EE (End to End Encrypted) documents on our Cryptpad instance documented here which can include rich text, spreadsheets, and forms.

Nextcloud Document or Form

If you have a Nextcloud account, you can quickly create a text document and/or a form or poll for responses. Create a share link and send it to people.

Mobilizon for larger scale events integrated with social media

Mobilizon at https://events.nixnet.services/ allows you to organize events privately or publicly. People can follow the events on free social media (the fediverse) to get updates. This is the only service mentioned here not running on my server, but I know the guy running it.

Mix and match these tools any way you want to manage an event.

Here I explain some tips and tricks to use these services together and generally what I have learned about living a safe and productive life online.