this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2026
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Boycott US
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Overview:
The community dedicated to boycotting the US until they stop fascism, restore full democracy and start following international law.
Americans have a moral obligation to resist Donald Trump and project 2025 at every turn.
America is a flawed democracy currently being ruled by oligarchs. Stop the backslide! Dont let America become the next Hungary.
America needs to challenge the court rulings of citizens united v. fec and shelby county v. holder, protect the media, implement independent district drawing, and the single transferable vote so they don't end up having people stay home in life-changing elections because they cannot vote for their favourite candidate.
Join 50501.chat to fight back!
Related communities:
Boycott:
!buycanadian@lemmy.ca
Activism:
!antitrumpalliance@lemmy.world
founded 1 year ago
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Anyone who doubts this should look up where TCP/IP (the foundation of the internet) was developed.
Presumably written before it became completely clear that Canada's government is on the wrong side of that fight, as seen in the news today:
"The legislative proposal continues to grant the government discretion to issue broad orders in secret compelling our most secure digital communication tools to bypass, circumvent or weaken critical security protocols to facilitate surveillance. Bill C-22, if passed as is, is a blank check for the government to force its surveillance objectives onto service providers at cost to the privacy and cybersecurity of everyone in Canada."
The Government of Canada does not respect your rights as a human, in turn, I do not respect their authority to govern my use of technology.
Move to an encrypted email provider that does not have servers in Canada. Set up an account with a VPN that does not have servers in Canada. Plan ahead for a way to pay for these services that do no use Canadian currency.
Encrypted email is the most pokiness thing. Send an email to anyone not on their server and it is plaintext and anyone can read it.
Alice and Bob both use encrypted email -> communication is safe.
Alice uses encrypted email, Bob is in a country over which Alice's adversary has no jurisdiction and Bob uses a regular email service -> communication is safe.
Alice uses encrypted email, Bob uses regular email but Alice's adversary has no idea that Alice talks with Bob because she is the only one being watched -> communication is safe.
Significant email metadata and routing information cannot be encrypted. All the typical email tools a user might try to use will work against their attempts to remain secure. It's a typical situation when security is retrofitted to an insecure interface. There are use cases for encrypted email but in 2026 it's hard to find one that isn't better served some other way.
That is why I am moving to self hosting as much as I can, I sail the high sees for media that is not Canadian or locked behind a pay wall that goes to fund US corps.
I use a two pihole setup to block ads on regular internet (with wireguard to VPN into my LAN on the rare occasion I leave my LAN) and I use unwatched to watch youtube on my ios devices, I plan on moving to another thing once my firewall is setup (with openwrt). I use Home Assistant and Homebridge to get away from sending my data out, as much as I can. I stopped using US based social media to move to the open standards, I moved my domains to Canadian hosts. The fall back DNS for my pihole unbound is CIRA.
The only US service I am paying for on the series of tubes is Claude, because it is helping me get my home lab working better, I will soon be stopping that. I want to get a used laptop from my local university to run Ollama, I want to get a used laptop to install Debian on to replace my iPad, I want to get a new phone to install a open source phone OS, but money. What I would really like to get would be a raspberry pi phone and tablet, but that would mean they would have to make one first!
Just a heads up that if you want to host full local models, you may want to try LM Studio or vMLX with models straight from hugging-face. Ollama is popular but they privilege their proprietary cloud MCP services and won’t even let you download web-enabled models unless you agree to use their API, which defeats your on-prem threat model.
Thanks for letting me know, I am still several months away from getting any hardware for a local LLM.