 Alright, now if you watch my channel, you're probably sick and tired of privacy concerns, security concerns, and censorship on the modern, highly centralized internet. And chances are if you watch my channel, then you fall under one of three different categories. I call them the normal people, the midwits, and the based ones. Let me just show a little diagram here on screen. Alright, here's my little diagram. As you can see, at the very left, we have the normal people. They're drooling out of their mouth, very flattering depiction here, and they're out here using WhatsApp as their messaging platform, right? Then on the right over here, we have the based ones. It's all these people using XMPP and things like RSS feeds and self-hosting email servers and self-hosting everything. That's sort of like the highest tier of internet usage, where a lot of it depends on yourself and not other platforms. And right in the middle, there's the worst offenders, in my opinion. The people who aren't willing to settle for the mainstream, but also aren't willing to do things themselves. They lack the laziness to be like the normal people, but they also have enough laziness to not go and be like the based ones. These are the tech midwits. And this video is about how you shouldn't be one. Don't be a tech midwit. What do I actually mean by tech midwit? What is that actually defined? What are some examples of being a tech midwit? Let's take a look at a few. So I'm going to divide this into three different sections. The three examples that I showed in my image, those being the GAB social media platform, the Protomail email server, and the Telegram messenger. So I'm going to address all those and the alternatives that you should hopefully strive to be using instead of these midwit tier things. So the first big one is Protomail. Now, if you have heard about private email and more privacy respecting email services, you've probably heard the name Protomail. I used to use Protomail. It's a good service for emails, definitely better than Gmail obviously in terms of privacy and security and censorship especially. However, just recently they have removed all references on their website regarding not logging your IP. And it has come out that they have indeed used their servers to track down an activist and contact a government. So they are not to be trusted. They are not to be trusted with their emails, just like Gmail isn't to be trusted with their emails. Like if we're going to be using Gmail or this, use this instead. However, it's much, much better to do this instead, which is self-hosting your own email server. Here's a little script by Luke Smith called email wiz. I just ran this little thing and set up a few certificates and stuff. And I was up and running with my own email server. Let me just pull it up here. Here's my email, alexadventure.org. Have fun sending spam and meme emails. But anyways, this is a great way to gain more anonymity, privacy and security on the internet, running your own email server, not letting an intermediary spy on what you're actually being sent and sending. So this is something I recommend to pretty much anyone who has any self-hosting knowledge. Just run that little script by Luke Smith, this one over here, and you'll be up and running in no time. All right, so another big one is messaging. And here's the telegram message. This is like one of those really, really, really awful mid-width choices using telegram as your messenger because it's literally no better than just using WhatsApp. And that's really what makes me angry about these mid-widths. You can't be normal and use WhatsApp, but you can't be cool and based and use, you know, something cool like XMPP. Firstly, telegram has the problem of, well, first of all, it's massively centralized. It's run by one company. Number two, we don't know the server software. The server software is not open-sourced. They could just be doing whatever the heck with your information when it comes there. And also, the encryption is very shoddy. Honestly, if you don't have your private keys, if you cannot read them and cannot verify the encryption between you and your friends, that's the instant proof that a messaging platform just isn't to be trusted. So don't use telegram. Don't be a tech mid-width. Don't use it. XMPP is interesting. XMPP is a protocol used for messaging. By itself, if you run an XMPP server, it's a great way to chat with people. It's federated just like email, so anyone can run it and chat with anyone else. And it's encrypted. You can have, you know, sending images. There's video and voice calls. There's everything. However, in its implementations, like in WhatsApp, for example, WhatsApp uses XMPP as its backend, if I remember correctly. And the thing about XMPP is that a lot of major messengers that use it aren't open to the wider XMPP network. But if you set up an XMPP server just like an email server, and then chat to other people on XMPP, it's a great way to chat with people. And I definitely recommend it. However, it's not as user-friendly as this other option, which is Matrix. Matrix is essentially the same as XMPP. It's federated chat. But it's far more, how to say, it's much better for people who are using Discord or Slack or WhatsApp. It's a little bit more intuitive. While XMPP is much more like IRC or instant messaging, it's far more retro and old-school. Matrix is like cool and you know, hip and whatever. So Matrix is what I recommend to most people, but XMPP is the very, very good option as well. Signal is also okay. I use this as a last resort, really. It's not perfect. It's got a lot of flaws. It's obviously centralized. They could be doing lots of awful stuff that we don't know about, but they seem pretty fine for now. And they're probably good, but I wouldn't trust them with confidential messages between my friends or family. So don't use Signal for all your secret private stuff. Use it if your friends use it. That's pretty much it. It's a good thing to settle for. It's a good compromise. Finally, this is the worst offender of the entire mid-wit set of software and websites and stuff. GAB.com. Now GAB is a Twitter alternative. And like a lot of these alternatives, it has some core issues. The main one being it offers nothing of substance to improve it upon Twitter. The only difference is that, oh, we claim we won't censor you, right? That's what they do. Now GAB is based off Mastodon, which is a federated Twitter-like protocol. And Activity Pub, which is sort of like the standard for all these Twitter-like protocols, has lots of server software. There's Pluroma and a few others. These are all basically the same. They're all the same as Twitter. You can post little thoughts and little snippets and images and stuff. You can retweet stuff. You can repost it, you know, comment, like. And personally, I don't see the appeal. Like, I don't really understand why people would go from Twitter, which is like an inherently flawed system where everybody just likes the same stuff and it becomes a massive kind of echo chamber and then go to a different platform, expecting human behavior to be different even though it's the exact same social media structure. Like, there's no real fundamental technical differences. Well, there are technical differences, but there are no fundamental design differences between Twitter and something like Pluroma or Gap. They're all the same. It's all one and the same. So, I don't recommend you use Gap, obviously, or any other of these quote-unquote good federated social medias like Pluroma. Instead, what I recommend to you is to use this. Use RSS feeds. You can use RSS feeds to subscribe to other people's existing feeds. Now, in my case, I have my own feed. If you go to denshi.org, there's a link over here, RSS. Click that and there's my feed. You can copy this, put it into your RSS client and you'll see my blog post. So, you can go over here, denshi blog. There's my blog post. There you go. There's also RSS feeds at most major social media. So, you don't have to go and leave social media if you want to keep up with your friends. Oh, I really, really can't. I really, really crave keeping up with all my friends and consuming stuff, right? Consuming the news. Well, CNN has an RSS feed. So does Fox News and so does Twitter and so does, of course, personal websites like the official blog and Monsters site. Great website, by the way. So, personal websites have them. CNN and large news companies have them. If for some reason you want to keep up with them and Twitter has them and I'm sure you can probably get them for Facebook and Instagram as well. So, if you want to keep up with your friends, this is a good way. But anyways, I've been denshi. I hope you enjoyed this video on not being a tech midwit. I hope you don't become a tech midwit. I hope you go directly from the normal WhatsApp using site to the based XMPP in Matrix and RSS feeds at self-hosted email server site. I hope you enjoyed this video. Leave all the comments and likes and dislikes in the description and all that. Don't forget to rate and subscribe or whatever. I've been denshi. Goodbye.