Linux

You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Free Software isn't a religion. Or at least it shouldn't be.

Assuming this isn't a troll post, why wouldn't it be possible? Not everything has an open source alternative that's nearly as good. I use Linux, I like open source, but I still use Discord and google services and occasionally a bunch of other closed source apps like Steam. Not everything ever made has to be open source.

I mean, it’s not like slavery or murder.

Being pro-FOSS does not mean you are anti proprietary software. There’s plenty of middle ground.

Video games, for example, where the company might not want to open source their server code for plenty of very legitimate reasons.

Mail is a super important utility. For physical mail, it’s a felony for anybody to open it. For digital mail, gmail open, reads, and inserts ads before handing it to you. It’s ok to think some things are important enough to mandate FOSS, and some things not.

Using free software is the important part, IMO. Not using non-free software is a good wishlist item. But of course there are those who differ with me. :)

I mean, ever tried hosting your own email server in ${CURRENT_YEAR}? Might as well write those mails to a thumb drive and throw it out of the window.

There’s a difference between advocacy and evangelism.

Things rarely are black and white.

I personally do not think it is conflicting, especially when you consider how hard or impractical it is to completely avoid the non-free/proprietary software. Services like Gmail, YouTube, and Facebook, to name a few, have been around for a long time, and they have become so entrenched in our daily lives and social circles that avoiding them completely and all at once may be too disruptive. I've been using Facebook since I was in high school, and that's also the platform I use to communicate with my closest friends. To suddenly jump away from that and expect my closest friends to follow me to the next major platform (e.g. Mastodon) is going to take a lot of effort and convincing, especially if my friends have people they connect with on Facebook and are not likely to move to another platform.

The same can be said for YouTube, even with their ridiculous anti-adblocker stance. People have become so invested in it that completely breaking away from YouTube would be almost impossible. Thankfully, that's where services like Piped and PeerTube come into play.

I think what really matters is that people at least make the effort to utilize FOSS whenever and wherever possible. Whether that be a Linux distribution over Windows and Mac, or a FOSS alternative to one of Google's or Microsoft's products, or a federated platform like Lemmy and Mastodon, there are so many ways we can demonstrate our love and support for FOSS, and utilizing a non-free/proprietary service does not make us any less committed to FOSS.

Anyways, that's just my two cents.

This kind of question comes up in many areas. And which software you use is less critical compared to politics. Of course you can use google and advocate foss, if your question is to be taken literally. It would not be the best thing you could do, but what would even be the best thing? Using software is not helping anyone (exept for software that takes your data or mines crypto while you use it or something). You would need to donate, contribute or bring people to do these things to really help the software/devs. Use which software/service you are comfortable with using.