The Great Digital Decluttering

I'm tearing the corporate rot out of my digital life one rotted limb at a time. It's slow going. These companies do not want you to leave, and they built the doors that way on purpose.

Google, Facebook, Windows. The whole hungry pile. Cory Doctorow has a name for the trap: "switching costs," or "vendor lock-in." They hook you with a free product that actually works. Then they squeeze. Upgrades, then your identity sold off in pieces, while the thing that was useful quietly dies in your hands.

The product was never the product. You are.

Becoming a user instead of being used

Here's where I've gotten so far.

Switched to Linux. I'm running Pop!_OS now. No bloatware, nothing phoning home to Microsoft. The machine feels fast again, like something I own instead of something I rent. It freed up a fat chunk of my hard drive and gave me a pile of genuinely useful software for $0. Modern distros run a lot of Windows programs without a fight if you need to port something over. And when you do hit a wall, Gemini and ChatGPT spit out tutorials detailed enough to walk you through anything.

I used to admin Linux boxes for a living, so the command line never scared me. It shouldn't scare you either. Modern distros barely ask for it. But if you're a power user? It's like computing on God Mode.

Killed corporate search. I run SearXNG now, open source and self-hosted. No algorithm deciding what I'm allowed to find. Organic results, real ones, with instances all over the globe to pick from.

Still circling the browser. Chrome for the moment, but I'm shopping. Brave is the early front-runner for how it handles ads, security, and privacy. There's an open source build called Ungoogled Chromium that looks promising too. I need to put more hours into that one before I commit.

Stuck on Workspace. I keep hunting for a replacement for Google Workspace and the options keep disappointing me. Plenty of open source alternatives exist. Most of them look like they crawled out of 1998 and behave like it. I know Workspace cold. For now, lock-in and data harvesting and all, I'm staying until something better shows up.

I gutted social media

X is gone. I finally walked. Since Musk took over it's been a slow rot, and if your goal is to be furious about something new every four minutes, it's the perfect machine for it.

I kept Reddit. It's barely better, but I can still dig up something useful or strange in there.

Mastodon is home now. ActivityPub interoperability, that indie Fediverse feel, no chain around my ankle. They've got their own outrage culture like everywhere else, but it filters out easy. Best part: switch instances whenever you want and lose nothing.

Facebook hangs on by a thread. I never post. It's a wire to family and old friends who still live there. I log in every week or two, touch base, get out.

I might let a few platforms back in. When I do, it'll be on purpose.

A healthier digital diet

This is still a work in progress. But my days have shifted from doom scrolling toward actually finding interesting things again.

Less depression. Less anxiety. Less of that hollow hopelessness about the whole human project.

You are what you eat. My digital diet is finally getting healthier.