“The Matrix” was released closer in time to the French Revolution than to today.

Yes, posts you make to public forums are public.

User accounts are a reasonable isolation mechanism for reasonably trustworthy server software.

What carrier? Do voice calls work?

Currently a Pixel with an anonymous custom ROM, although I’ve got a PinePhone on my desk I need to test more.

Cell phones are incompatible with privacy. Any phone necessarily constantly sends your location to your cell provider just in order to work. But even if that’s true, there’s no reason to also let someone else be the remote administrator for a sensor node with a camera and microphone that you carry everywhere. Running a mobile OS with a universal backdoor is bad times.

Oracle a company to actively avoid doing business with or realying on in any way.

Spend the $5 for a commodity VPS from literally any standard vendor. I suggest Vultr.

I’ve got a couple VPSes, hosting

• Mailcow, because email is identity.
• Asterisk, because phone #s are also identity.
• Matrix-Synapse, for personal messaging even though XMPP is probably better.
• ttrss, even though it’s junk software with a jerk developer.
• A bunch of self-developed web apps

Self hosting email is obnoxious, but it’s also one of the only remnants of the traditional distributed internet that’s still broadly accepted.