Government is also the entity that will be prosecuting/persecuting you when they don’t like what you have to say.

Not with that attitude.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

They don’t need the cooperation of telecom providers. They receive the same signal you send to the cell tower. Even if the signal is encrypted so they can’t see what you are sending, they can identify that you are sending.

With enough receivers listening, they can identify your location to a pretty high accuracy.

Privacy policies are irrelevant here. They are picking up unique data as your phone communicates with a cell tower. You can do it with a $15 RTL-SDR receiver.

Get a hundred receivers and you can pinpoint anybody in a city.

Can I make my house buy itself for me and then “whoopsie, the house can’t pay the bills, guess it will file for bankruptcy and hand me a big ol’ stack of cash”.

2008 called…

Yes. The relevant metric:

99.55% of posts are on a single instance. That is not “federated” in any meaningful sense.

On behalf of whoever is paying for your internet connection, do not torment without a VPN.

If you ignore this advice, be aware that the aformentioned person will get a nastygram in the mail, complete with the exact title of the torment you downloaded. They have no qualms with outing your darkest perversions to the breadwinner(s) in your household.

F-Droid is a decent replacement for the play store. Lots of FOSS and less-enshittified apps available.