One of the most important things I've done over the past few years is my slow and meticulous switch from the entanglement of corporations into locally controlled services. I grew up into the internet, so a lot of the things I did as a kid were poorly chosen in the longrun. Mainly I've made countless accounts across a whole host of companies, and relied too much on paid or otherwise company-controlled products and software to run my life.
The biggest change was switching to Linux, which took about 3 tries of going back and forth between it and Windows before I dove fully in. It's important to take these life changes slow to make sure things aren't too disruptive. Each time I learned more, chose different distros, and set my system up for better sucess. I'm so glad I'm off of Microsoft's hellscape, and have managed to claw back a signifigant amount of my data away from them.
Linux made me have to grapple with the fact I needed to rely on open-source software and be willing to trust people who couldn't get money from me. By now I'm a staunch advocate for exclusively open source stuff, but that sort of mindset shift when capitalism has rotted your brain for so long takes a lot to convince. By this point I have no paid software in my system. I technically had Substance Painter under a previous purchase for a while, but I found a Blender plugin that's made me uninstall SP alltogether.
Next in my journey was clawing back from social media and closing down a lot of accounts on other sites. While its good for algorithms and such to be posting everywhere, its not good for the brain to be social media addicted, so once I found Tumblr as such a laid back and fully reblog-focused platform, everything else has been wiped out. I made sure to make full archives of all of my history on those platforms, and anyone else wanting to narrow their reach should take advantage of companies forced compliance to allow users to download all their data. I've dabbled with rehosting that data on multiple websites and other platforms, but its only worked on and off. Just like Windows it took me a few tries to land now in a place I feel satisfied keeping around for a bit.
One of the easiest improvements to my life was installing adblockers. I got off Chrome pretty quickly after their Manifest V3 garbage, and switching to uBlockOrigin was so amazing. I did the same thing on my phone by moving away from prebuilt apps and just using the websites through Firefox, occasionally switching to desktop mode to bypass app download popups. Removing ads reduces so much stress and annoyance. My next step was installed Sponsorblock and DeArrow which cut out even more frivolous time and noise from YouTube videos. uBlock has a useful feature to permanently disable elements, which I've done to clean up frequent use websites to remove any and all fluff elements.
Speaking of phone use, Samsung and Google have begun tightening their grip on the Android ecosystem, and while I'd love to use a Linux phone, Ubuntu Touch doesn't support voLTE on enough devices yet, so I've elected to remove the Play Store and as many apps as possible from my device. I now have the Neo Store which has replaced my launch screen, messenger, camera app, ect to open source versions. Samsung is still somehow able to force install apps onto my device starting this year- despite having an ancient phone that hasn't recieved android updates for a good half decade, so I'll be switching to something like the FairPhone.
Then was finally getting off one of the giant email platforms, email is the biggest stranglehold on a long-run digital life. I've switched to a paid email service that doesn't harvest data, but even then I'm still tied to multiple old accounts child me made that still link to important places. Switching emails is usually easy, but once you get down to the smaller sites or ones you don't remember all your account details for, its usually going to a support page to get things done and that's a lot of friction to fully getting off. At some point I'm gonna bite the bullet and do a full sweep to change over my final accounts, but I'd need to thouroughly check through absolutely everything, cause once my email is gone I lose any accounts I forgot about.
A lot of my stuff is now consolidated to my local drive, my archive.org page, Patreon, Github, and this website. It's good when atleast a copy of things are on just a few services to manage. I've still gotta get rid of my YouTube and some smaller sites I've hosted on since they contain the final bits and pieces I don't want lost to time. Its technically easy to just rid of all those accounts, but I wanna make sure nothing is lost because my data and my art is precious to me. In the future, hopefully this website gets off Neocities and can be hosted on the same VPS I run Cheese-E-Pedia on, along with all my actual tens of gigs of downloadable projects and art. Patreon is just a stop-gap so people have a way to donate to me while letting me have basically unlimited file storage. The end goal- probably a few years from now, will be that 90% of what I do is all found on this site, one that I can move between VPS hosts or run off a local machine, and then the remaining bit to whatever social media platform I stick around with.
This consolidation of my digital life has inspired a lot of changes in my real life. My distrust for companies through everything I've witnessed has made me get rid of almost my entire lifelong video game collection, because I can just pirate it. Same with DVDs and most forms of physical media unless its got a special or nostalgic quality to it. My product purchases continue to focus on 'tools' to improve my life practically or to let me create more interesting physical art like my 3D printer or embroidery machine. Just as I've shyed away from official software suites and towards open source, I've been buying non name brand groceries and switching my LEGO collection to just second hand and bootleg stuff. I've been making a good effort to switch entirely off my car and towards an ebike (though as its 2026 Summer I physically cannot commute with it right now without risking my health). Moving my data back into my hands has really improved how I go about the rest of my life and has made me a much happier person with a lot more skills learned. I reccomend others try it out too.
References
- Piracy
- Open-Source Game Dev (Godot)
- Open-Source OS (Arch Linux)
- Open-Source Paint Software (GIMP)
- Open-Source 3D Modeling (Blender)
Comments
