[imiric]

I wish I had your optimism.

> There's a movement online to get people weaned off big tech and surveillance capitalism.

This is a niche movement at best, ironically mostly followed by people who are already concerned about privacy. I doubt they manage to convince many others into joining them and abandoning big tech. My own attempts at doing so have mostly been met with a few responses: "I have nothing to hide", "It's too inconvenient to switch", "I just use it for X and don't spend a lot of time on it", or "I don't care".

> The thing about privacy online is that it's hard to measure, since many opt out of telemetry

Hah, right :) I think we can track it by simply seeing how the user bases compare between big tech and privacy-focused services. So far the numbers are several orders of magnitude apart, it's pointless to even compare them. There are many reasons for this, and I hope things keep improving, but I doubt we'll even make a dent in 10 years.

[nonrandomstring]

> This is a niche movement at best

No, really you are wrong. I am watching this closely and if you have not noticed the tectonic political shift going on you're living on Mars. Just the other day the US signed with 60 other signatory nations on a bill specifically set to burn down widespread privacy violations. And the US is tepid compared to a groundswell in Europe.