Why this blog?
So, why a personal blog in this day and age of Facebook and a plethora of other micro-blogging sites? Certainly, there are more direct ways to interact with friends, family and colleagues that Facebook already offers and in most cases solves. Which, ironically is the point.
Over the last few years I’ve grown tired of the all the shenanigans surrounding privately owned tech companies and how they deal with privacy and personal data. Who can forget this one?
I’ve never been comfortable that one entity, let alone a group of entities, has the ability to sell my personal data to the highest bidder without my consent, including track my purchases and sell my location data. I’ll never forget the conversation I had some years back, with my over arching head of development. He was having a gosh-golly-gee moment about how cool it was, that based on cell tower pings, Google/Apple basically knew your geo-location within feet from where you actually stood at any given time. He was spit balling on how we could leverage that to have more timely deliveries of emails based on a persons location (I.e. you’re standing next to the store, here’s an email or push about a sale in said store). Not that using location data was new information to me, it’s just every time I heard this mentioned, there was always a fleeting moment of how slightly Orwellian that felt and also being equally uncomfortable with the idea that personal privacy was taking a back seat to corporate profits and well… my paycheck.
This coupled with the lossey-goosey way in which most data and privacy has been handled by Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon… etc. well, it has left me unsettled. It’s not enough that all of them have created walled gardens limiting your abilities. It’s that all of them want you so locked in, all the time… and are actively engaged in anti-competitive practices with your data and privacy at the heart of the matter:
Meta again denies that Netflix read users private Facebook Messages
Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google
And the above is just a brief sample surrounding users data and privacy.
Welcome to the shit show
Cory Doctorow summed up this whole process with the term “Enshitifcation”. He coined it to describe the process in which the value of a site, social media or otherwise, diminishes over time for the end user.
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”
Furthermore, he goes on to elaborate on one feature that all of the above mentioned share (from the end user stand point) which is “Enshittocene”. The high cost of user switching, that is: leaving the platform leads to us being locked into the platform. I mean who want’s to lose all their uploaded photos? The 500 friends of which maybe you see 20 of them post day in day out. It’s the context and connection that keeps us locked in. But, what if you could take your data and leave? This would introduce competition in to the mix which no platform wants, as it removes value, your data, from the platform . Also, readily demonstrated by the links above.
This, and this alone is why the I believe a decentralized internet is so important. Because, it gives the end user back the control. So, what is decentralization?
“Unlike the traditional, centralized internet where data and applications are controlled by a few powerful companies, the decentralized web aims to give users more control over their data, privacy, and online identity. With the decentralized web, users are in control of their data and online identity, and the data is not controlled by a centralized entity.”
So back to the post at hand. The answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this is I’m basically going back to when the internet was decentralized by doing a personal blog, and also by being on Mastodon, a federated/decentralized social media site. This is to step away from closed social media, and write more personally about topics that interest me. Besides, I love to hack and the blog gives me that outlet.
In doing this, I’ve chosen open source methods where ever possible. I’ve chosen to host this site on Git Hub Pages even though I’m well aware of it being owned by Microsoft, this is my only concession. I’ve further chosen to use Hugo, an open source static site generator, fancy way of saying I code it, Hugo builds it. For comments on the site I use Cactus Comments a federated open source commenting system. If you want to comment down below, please go ahead, no login required, no tracking. The site itself was developed on Linux using open source tools. The repository is on a Linux box. Basically, I wanted to build it, without it feeding many of the ecosystems that exist for their own ends. And rest assured, my blog will be a Tech-bro free zone.
For those who don’t feel compelled to go as far as I have, there are alternatives to the whole closed social media ecosystem. Alternatives I’ve been using for well over a year now and have found them to be great:
Both are decentralized/federated and nobody’s bitch. You can hit me up on my Mastodon instance https://musician.social/@Vee. Trust me I’ll be happy to see you there.
– E’nuf said, Love and Rockets
This is an expanded post that appeared on the original blog. It has been rewritten and updated.