Before the recent API purge, you could access public data from sites like Reddit and Twitter pretty easily too. I mean it’s still easy now, just not free. The same thing used to be true for Facebook, but their API purge was several years ago and their data model made less data straightforwardly public.

Personally I’d rather have my public posts be straightforwardly public than the illusion of privacy provided by sites like Facebook. Maybe a lot of people can get away with treating messages to a private Facebook group as private a lot of the time, but it’s simply a wrong mental model that will lead to wrong decisions. A message can either be private or be broadcast to an open-ended set of people - not both.

Yes, posts you make to public forums are public.

User accounts are a reasonable isolation mechanism for reasonably trustworthy server software.

What carrier? Do voice calls work?

Currently a Pixel with an anonymous custom ROM, although I’ve got a PinePhone on my desk I need to test more.

Cell phones are incompatible with privacy. Any phone necessarily constantly sends your location to your cell provider just in order to work. But even if that’s true, there’s no reason to also let someone else be the remote administrator for a sensor node with a camera and microphone that you carry everywhere. Running a mobile OS with a universal backdoor is bad times.

I stopped dual booting long ago. If a game doesn’t work on Linux, I find it much easier and more fun to simply do something else. At this point, the threat of losing my browser tabs would be enough inconvenience to dissuade me, and I generally have quite a bit more active state than that on my computer that would be lost with a reboot.

Before I gave up on Windows gaming I did use a dedicated machine with a KVM switch for a while. But even that simply stopped seeing enough use to justify it.

Oracle a company to actively avoid doing business with or realying on in any way.

Spend the $5 for a commodity VPS from literally any standard vendor. I suggest Vultr.

I’ve got a couple VPSes, hosting

• Mailcow, because email is identity.
• Asterisk, because phone #s are also identity.
• Matrix-Synapse, for personal messaging even though XMPP is probably better.
• ttrss, even though it’s junk software with a jerk developer.
• A bunch of self-developed web apps

Self hosting email is obnoxious, but it’s also one of the only remnants of the traditional distributed internet that’s still broadly accepted.