- I do not have personal accounts for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter(X), Reddit, Tiktok, $app, ad nauseam. I have some dummy accounts for some of these platforms because people seem dead set on existing inside of them. Sometimes I just want to see that funny video. Lately however, I've stopped caring and move on.
- If I log into that dummy social account, I log out when I'm done.
- I never log into Google.
- I use masked emails for anything that isn't truly personal.
- I use a different username and password for every website. There is no patterning to them and the passwords are all 32+ characters of gibberish.
- I pay for my search engine. This has been the largest quality of life improvement for day to day interneting.
- I pay for a bookmark manager. I could host my own but I used their free tier for so long, I started paying because I actually liked the service.
- I pay for my email. This has been the second largest quality of life improvement for interneting. (I have some of the dummy accounts linked to free services, some sites only allow a login from Google or another OAuth provider)
- I browse the internet with Chromium. The ungoogle-ed version.
- I don't fuck with advertisements. I don't fuck with paywalls.
- On the browser level I run ublock origin, a user scripts plugin, and Bypass Walls Clean.
- On a DNS level, I run a custom DNS address that handles the bulk of blocking advertising and other annoyances.
- If I'm really interested and there is still a paywall or adblock active, I try an archive.ws style site.
- If I am unable to see a site at this point, I say fuck it and move on.
- When I wake up, I like to check my "feed". It's a list of RSS feeds by writers, bloggers, news services, weirdos, artsy things, etc. I use NetNewsWire to view the feeds but there are many options.
- I self host many services that replace traditionally paid ones.
- FreshRSS
- Gitea
- Immich
- LLM provider backend
- LLM provider frontend
- Mediawiki
- n8n
- paperless
- Plex and related friends
- These self hosted services are not exposed to the internet. I use a wireguard service to access them. No tunnel, no access.
- I host my own websites on hardware I own.
- I don't post comments anywhere anymore.
- I actively try to avoid Discord. It makes me so sad that it's caught on as a community space for many vibrant communities. Forums are so good and they're searchable. There are chat clients that are better than Discord and no/low cost. I don't want to do a fucking quest. I don't want to know more about Wumpus or why that's the logo. I don't want to pay for themes or mega emojis.
- I dislike Youtube as a platform but it's where people post some great content. For one off's, I will watch in browser - the ad blocking I have setup works well and I don't see advertisements anymore. For people who for post often, I use Pinchflat to grab their content and add it to Plex.
These choices are largely out of step with the rest of my friends and family. I do not want another gateway to the web like AOL. I refuse to allow advertisers to take over my browsing experience. I may not be able to stop the tracking across sites and services, but at least I'm not seeing the ads. I want to be online as a person, an individual and not as a target demographic for the latest $thing. I want the rest of the web to return to/morph into how email is - protocol first, vendor second.
The internet is best invention we've gotten in our lifetimes. I believe it needs advocating for and tending to for it to be as free for others in the future.