a bitter stand

23/02/2025

i've been pushed further and further away from of the modern internet.

in school i had multiple lessons about "ethical consumption"; being aware of who your money is going to, and cutting it off if you disagree with a business practice. it really stuck with me for the better i'd say, as i've stopped myself from buying useless memberships time and time again. (for the last time discord, im NOT getting nitro)
i even found myself dropping games a majority of my friends played. hating overwatch is the norm nowadays since they rereleased the same game filled with false promises, but in 2019 the blitzchung situation was the breaking point for me.

this mentality has gotten more broad as time has passed. when windows 11 was in open beta i knew i wanted nothing to do with it, so i decided to challenge myself to daily drive linux on my laptop over windows. i never thought i'd get as invested as i have, but the benefits have been showing up left and right. you start really understanding your computer deeply and know when and how to fix issues, and can make fine tweaks on the fly to make things work just the way you need.

with the adoption of linux, the next obvious move is to find open source/decentralized solutions to common applications. there's many music players with clean ui's perfect for .FLAC collections, the options for front-end youtube clients are getting better, and i've been enjoying using alternative messengers even though my gf's the only other person using 'em.

in the midst of all this experimenting, the major players in social media decided to show their hand and push towards a less safe future for queer folk & others. meta has shifted strongly towards a certain flavour of anti-lgbt & hatespeech allowance in order to pander to cough current social climates COUGHCOUGH HACK.
i barely need to say anything about twitter's massive downfall, it's self combusted into an echo chamber of who can yell the loudest in pointless scream fights. with He Who Must Not Be Named having legitimate legal power now, its arguably a honeypot to contain the people it used to help to convict them at any time if wanted. ^{(thats speculation. i obvs dont know exactly what will happen, but mr. manchild screams adjacent ideas at anyone who will listen to him.)}

so with practically every major social media platform unsafe to use, where can scared tech nerds like me crawl to for safety? the indie web & decentralized social media!
i've been eager to dip my toes into the fediverse, especially for the extras you can add to your instance. it's still intimidating to get into with how many instances there are, and it almost seems like most people i follow make their own for themself for self-moderation (probably the most ideal outcome). it's going to be doable once i move into a new place, so i'll probably dive into it then.

because of all this, i've decided to return here and clean stuff up! i've set up an rss feed for the blog to make it easier to get updates. link will be on the main blog page!
i had two nearly finished blog posts that were unfortunately lost midst laptop repair trips. ill be rewriting what i can soon.