Dissident December

I grew up in the halcyon days of the Internet. It was a time of shareware video games and dial-up bulletin boards. I was there when the World Wide Web stormed the gates of walled gardens like AOL and Compuserve. I remember the web before it was captured by technofeudal lords. I met my future spouse online at a time when people thought online dating was a ticket to some serial killer's basement dungeon. I remember when the Internet was a hopeful place. When Google told us their motto was Don't be evil, we were dumb enough to believe them. We were all going to cut the cord, break free of overpriced cable TV and watch what we wanted, when we wanted. The Internet was going to Make the World a Better Place™.

We've all seen how that has turned out.

The Internet of today is an outrage machine inside a hellish panopticon of surveillance capitalism. All of big tech's free candy turned out to be addictive and poisonous. The cable cord we cut was replaced with dozens of smaller wires attached to an ever-growing number of streaming services. When we "buy" digital movies or TV we don't own them. Tech manufacturers are putting DRM tech into everything from coffee makers to air filters. Basically, it's a shitshow.

I love technology but I hate how the broligarchy uses it to surveil us, divide us, and just generally ruin our lives. So I thought I'd go over some of the ways I've been trying to push big tech out of my life as much as I can, without abandoning all the useful things tech can do. However, as soon as I got past writing the introduction, I began to realize that the topic was too broad and I'd never finish it if I didn't narrow the focus. Also, does my audience really give a shit about my homelab? Or does it only care about potatoes? I guess I'll soon find out. Either way, at the end of this post I'm just going to provide a simple list of the big tech alternatives I'm currently using, and limit the rest of this discussion to one of the hardest problems in this space:

Social Media

They say no one hates Star Wars more than Star Wars fans, and the same can be said of social media. Everyone hates social media, most of all those of us who use it. A thousand drunken toddlers armed with pinking shears couldn't have shredded our social fabric as much as Facebook and Twitter. But humans are social creatures, so we keep trying to make connections with each other, even as that evolutionary instinct is weaponized against us.

I limit my social media use mostly to Substack and Bluesky. While writing this post I decided to sign up for Mastodon as well. Once in a while I'll comment on Hacker News. I'm also on Letterboxd, but I'll get to that in a minute. Substack, Bluesky, and Hacker News are all tainted with the stench of Silicon Valley venture capitalism. So why do I still use them? Let me explain.

Substack:

Substack, for all its faults, offers a unique combination of features I can't currently find anywhere else. I know of no other platform that integrates a social media platform with email newsletter capability quite like Substack. This is a pretty big selling point for someone trying to build up a readership from nothing. Medium will send out emails on your behalf, but they no longer give you access to the actual email address of your subscribers. In fact, I know of no social media platform other than Substack that does this. There are plenty of other email newsletter platforms out there, but most of them are going to cost you, and almost all of them will require you provide a physical address for the footer of your emails. Substack allows me to send out emails for free without exposing my identity, even to Substack.

I suspect Substack will eventually succumb to the enshitification cycle, and I'll be forced to abandon it. Their alleged commitment to free speech already crumbled in the face of the UK's new censorship law. If the Trump admin demands they start removing specific accounts, I doubt they will stand up to him. Should I need to run for the exit, at least I will be able to take my email subscribers with me. Whether or not I'll actually be able to get any emails past their spam filters is another story, which I will touch on later.

Mastodon and Bluesky:

As my grandpappy (probably) used to say, it may be more efficient to kill two birds with one stone, but it's more fun to kill one bird with two stones. In the case of Twitter, the more stones the better. In the aftermath of Trump's first electoral victory in 2016, as the seas boiled and the skies bled, the movement to kill the bird site with as many stones as possible gained real momentum for the first time. People had been thirsting for a real alternative to Facebook and Twitter for years. None of their would-be challengers could ever manage to get past the weigh-in, let alone gain enough critical mass to get in the ring and throw a punch. The network effect is a greedy bitch.

Then came Mastodon, a Twitteresque social media platform that anyone with enough technical knowledge could host on their own. When the ketamine junkie, perpetual teenage edgelord, and wealthy oligarch Elon Musk purchased Twitter on a lark, a lot of people saw Mastodon as the answer. Even with its unfamiliar concept of a decentralized, federated social network, more than 200,000 people flocked to join the nascent Fediverse platform.

Mastodon has a dedicated user base and the support of a lot of Fediverse evangelists, but for all its post-Musk growth it remains a relatively niche platform. This is in part because of the learning curve inherent in joining the Fediverse and in part because Bluesky came along and ate Mastodon's lunch.

In under 2 years Bluesky has already reached around 40 million users. Mastodon seems to have peaked at around 2.5 million users. Bluesky achieved this by positioning itself as another decentralized Twitter alternative with a lower barrier to entry for the normies. As any ActivityPub acolyte will tell you, Bluesky is decentralized only in theory. It is another Silicon Valley Kaiju, funded by venture capitalists, but its architecture is structured in a way that a mass exodus to a competitor could be possible, should they ever be purchased by a random Nazi billionaire.

In my opinion, the bottom line is this: Mastodon is better philosophically, but Bluesky has a much wider audience.

The Email Problem

I know I said I was going to keep this post focused on social media, but since Substack and email are so intertwined, I think this is relevant. The story of email is one of the great tragedies of the modern Internet. In theory, anyone can run their own email server. People can, in theory, also host their own Bluesky replacement. However, just as very few people actually do host their own Bluesky, the vast majority of people use one of the big email providers like Gmail or Outlook, which are very likely to throw anything from your little email server right in the SPAM folder. Even if you have the time and technical knowledge to solve the deliverability problem, you also have to deal with incoming SPAM. This is a huge problem with email, one that even a behemoth like Google still struggles to contain. With the advent of LLMs, the problem is only likely to get worse.

This is why I've started using Proton Mail. Proton is a Swiss company, mostly owned by a non-profit foundation, that has built its entire brand around privacy. They offer a free tier, but the paid tiers also offer the ability to use your own domain names, so I can have a pickleglitch.com email address. They also offer other alternatives to Google, such as a calendar, cloud storage, etc. I would love to be able to run my own email server, but given the impracticality, Proton Mail seems like a good alternative.

And speaking of alternatives, here is the promised list of big tech alternatives I am using:

Pi-hole

This isn't really an alternative to anything, but it is a great way to block ads for your entire home. Using this, I never have to see ads show up on my Roku. If you try one thing on this list, try this. It's not too terribly difficult to set up, and it's like a gateway drug to self-hosting.

Mullvad VPN

VPNs are all sold as a means of protecting your privacy, but none of them takes that as seriously as Mullvad. Like Proton (which also offers a VPN service), privacy is Mullvad's entire brand. Not only do they not keep any logs of their traffic, they'll even let you mail them an envelope of cash to pay for their service, so they won't have any info about you.

Home Assistant

I love home automation. I love turning my bedroom lights on and off or changing my thermostat without getting out of bed. I tried Google Home for a while but I was really not cool with some evil megacorp having a 24/7 live audio feed to my living room. Not only that, but Google Home is kinda shit. Home Assistant is a free, open-source alternative that you can run on your local home network on fairly minimal hardware. I've found it to be a lot more stable and usable than the big tech offerings.

Immich

Immich is a really nice Google Photos replacement that you can self-host. It can even do a context search of your photos. So you can search for "cat" and it will find pictures of cats.

Nextcloud

This is a pretty decent self-hosted replacement for Google Drive. It has lots of add-on apps you can use, including alternatives to Google Docs.

LibreOffice

Your old-school, free and open-source MS Office replacement. It's not perfect, but it does everything I need, without any AI bullshit. It can also be integrated into Nextcloud to allow for some collaboration capability.

Jellyfin

It's pretty well-known at this point that when you "buy" digital media from Amazon, Google, etc. you aren't really buying anything. They can revoke your access at any time, without a warning or a refund. This is why physical media has been making a comeback, but personally I don't have the shelf space available for all those Blu-rays. So instead, I can convert those discs to digital files with a program called Handbrake and store them on a Jellyfin server. The discs can live in a box in the basement, and I can watch my media on any device with a Wi-fi connection, even if the Internet goes down.

GrapheneOS

GrapheneOS is a much more secure, privacy-focused version of Android specifically designed for the Google Pixel. I recently purchased a refurbished Google Pixel from Backmarket and I couldn't be happier with it. It lets you use multiple alternate app stores and a "sandboxed" version of Google Play so you can still get all the mainstream apps. The only thing it can't do is use Google Wallet's Tap to Pay feature because of some BS restrictions Google has in place.

AlternativeTo and Final thoughts

Every day it seems one tech product or another goes to shit. Whether it's Firefox getting a little too cozy with advertising, or Microsoft cramming copilot into goddamned everything, I've found AlternativeTo.net to be a helpful resource for finding... alternatives. Sometimes there aren't any options outside of big tech, but a lot of times there are, and a lot of times they are better. So go forth, and find your alternatives.