For those who are paranoid about this - some of you have a Facebook account, and half of you have a Google-filled smartphone. Privacy is important, but IMO there should be a balance between convenience and privacy - unless you actually do stuff that requires the utmost privacy or you need to stay fully anonymous everywhere as much as possible.

Division of identity - that is, having unique profiles/identities for different types of things you do on the web, using alias emails and anonymous email for certain things etc. - is a more viable strategy than trying to be 100% anonymous on the web.

Commercial social media that is free does and will track your activity on the site, whether for personalized ads or for algorithm purposes. Lemmy and Mastodon don’t because they’re FOSS, and don’t run on ads (99.9% of the time).

In my country nobody (or at least, most people don’t) buy their own routers, it’s always a subscription on top of the existing internet service

In our country, texting (through the built-in Messenger app) is mostly done as an emergency measure, as most people here use Meta’s other messaging app, WhatsApp.

Individuals are constantly surrounded by potentially meaningful information; however, their ability to use this information is consistently constrained by cognitive systems that are capable of attending to and processing only a small amount of the information available at any given time

100% this.

This begins with ABC, will end with other media resources. But I doubt Mastodon will be the future. Facebook and Instagram seem to be more viable options for mainstream media outlets, though I would also like to see more of them creating Mastodon servers, the way the BBC did recently.