Thanks for your perspective. I'm okay with everyone having their own story and ways to deal with things. We're all have our individual struggles to deal with. But I'm always glad to hear other people's stories.

I don't think I'm entitled to lecture you. Feel free to skip the following paragraphs...

Maybe we're a bit different and diversity is a good thing. I operate a few selfhosted services like PeerTube, Matrix chat, Nextcloud and a few more for me and my friends on a small YunoHost instance. It's not too difficult. I used to handle some sensitive information about children back in the days when I volunteered with youth work. I regularly help relatives with their computers and keep a few backups for them. I've occasionally moderated stuff online and deleted a few illegal pictures of violence. And I sometimes deal with stuff myself that I don't want to become public knowledge or part of one of the regular data breaches.

I kind of need privacy available to me. And I know lots of other people who do. I keep other people's data on an encrypted harddrive and use Linux to do my best to protect it. Not because it contains illegal stuff, but it is not of any concern to me what genre of porn they watch and I'm not going to tell their spouses, either. I'm afraid the opposing requirements to protect user-data, the GDPR which I'm required by law to enact if I want to offer independent services to other people, and on the other side something like the Data Retention Directive, the Copyright Directive and now the Chat Control will destroy independent services and strip us of the remaining diversity on the internet. The tools to detect CSAM and ContentID for copyright are only available to the big companies who already dominate everything. Lemmy would have to close, once something like that becomes mandatory. We'd need to go back to Reddit. I'd have to shut down my services for my friends, tell them I'm technically compromised and I forward every single info about them. The people who now do holiday camps would struggle to deal with the medical info and what else parents tell them. (If they wanted to do it correctly, which they should.) And they have additional requirements nowadays. Following the incidents wit the catholic church, we have additional measures in place to deal with child abuse. Or a kid just approaches someone and tells them they're not okay otherwise. This is super super sensitive and needs to be dealt with absolute care. I've had phone calls for similar things because email isn't encrypted.

It kind of only destroys everything for the honest people. Disproportionately. The criminals don't abide by the law. They probably have the technical tools available to them to evade getting caught. And it won't affect them too much.

Chat Control will be a disservice to the exploited children, lead to stories like this, and this, 15 year old kids getting convicted for sending nudes amongst partners consentually, have them face prosecution even if they receive it involuntarily, and do quite some damage to them in the process even if they're deemed not guilty in the end. (I read somewhere ~~about 80% of cases of child pornography is minors being the 'offender'.~~ Edit: at least 42% is minors being the 'offender'. 1, 2) People predict the police being overwhelmed by false positives and them having their time taken away from proper investigations.

It's just bad in any way imaginable. I don't want everyone to become a warrior in my fights. It's okay some people address climate change, some speak up against oppression or tackle populism. Maybe someone just isn't a 'fighter' and is kind to the people around them, cares for the elderly or makes the world around them a better place and doesn't care too much about politics. All of that is alright and noble. You do you. I'm always unsure how to react to resignation. I know how it feels. Hope you're alright. And I sincerely wish you the best with the things you deal with.

We're able to do something. People have fought oppression over and over again. Often times successfully. The data retention directive has deemed to be illegal and Chat Control 1 failed, too. It wouldn't have turned out that way if not for the people who resisted and spoke up.