I feel like the last year has been a great push for me to slowly detach myself from giant companies and ensure what I do is in my control and ownership
- Finally switched over to linux permanently
- switched to firefox
- enabled adblocker, sponsor blockers, and tracker removers
- disabled autoplay and the recommendations sidebar on YouTube (highly highly encourage, though I still keep the homepage open so I can choose when to browse new suggested content rather than it pestering me)
- downloaded all my tumblr posts and now host them parallel on my website (stuck here until we find some decentralized way of doing social media right)
- cleared out 99% of my online storage to now be on multiple hard-drive backups
- downloaded locally all my music
- removed myself from basically every data tracking social media platform except this and YouTube
- And now currently I’m trying to consolidate all my feeds into just an RSS reader.
It takes a long time and a lot of planning, but its very rewarding to take control over what you want to see, how you see it, how its formatted, ect. I find these are my steps to an easy transition off a certain service:
- Download all your data and back it up. Now your account can be deleted at any time with no remorse.
- Find browser extensions that enhance and modify the experience to what you might need. Use that to tangibly guide your preferences. Go ahead and remove the app on your phone if its there.
- Research every alternative service and try them out. Begin moving certain activity exclusively to the alternative. Take time getting used to it and see if its better to try more alternatives.
- Completely jump ship, delete the account, move all feeds or settings over.
Its an ongoing process but there’s still probably a few more years of this to go through. Future plans are:
- Completely remove all prior emails and self host a new one
- Get off Discord entirely except for running the wiki server. It sucks that Discord is so prevalent. Probably move to various forums. Maybe look into some sort of forum management software such as how RSS feeds tame articles and videos into one place.
- Setup adblockers directly into my router so ads won’t even appear on phones.
- Setup my phone to just straight up also run linux. There’s a few mobile-designed linux platforms to look into until I decide.