A collection of past blog posts I want to hang onto. for reasons. you are welcome to read them, if you like.
These posts came from my Bear blog:
https://drmollytov.bearblog.dev
By far the most common pushback I get when I talk about my recent divorce from Big Tech is "but it's so convenient!" "It" being Google services, Apple services, Microsoft, or Meta, mostly. (Absolutely no one I have talked to claims Twitter is "convenient," even if they're still on Twitter.)
I thought so too, once. It's how I ended up in them. The farther I get from Big Tech, however, the more I'm asking: convenient for whom and for what? What does the tech do, who does it do it *for*, and who does it do it *to*?
At first, I thought divorcing Big Tech meant rejecting convenience entirely. Now I realize: it actually means *making the tools I use convenient **for me**, not for their creators.*
Some examples:
Proton Mail has an associated Proton Drive, which fulfills basically the same functions as Google Drive. However, I didn't start using Proton Drive when I switched to Proton Mail. I opted for CryptPad instead.
Using Gmail and Google Drive together is "convenient" for the user. You can open attachments in Gmail and save them straight to your Google Drive, for instance. I can't do that with Proton Mail and CryptPad. Instead, I have to download the attachment and then upload it.
CryptPad, unlike Google products, has zero options for password recovery. if I manage to forget my password, everything in my CryptPad is gone forever. That could be extremely inconvenient to me.
On top of this, not all my email even goes to my Proton address! I actually have four separate accounts with four separate providers (none of which are Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo). Each account handles different levels of necessary security, from "actual trash" to "emails containing info about my health, finances, family, and/or religious leanings."
But here's what makes my current setup convenient to me:
Google had orders of magnitude more information on me than any one service has now. That is extremely convenient. To me.
Frogfind.com is a search engine that strips out everything but text and hyperlinks. It's ideal for use with Lynx or other command-line search functions.
Because Frogfind won't load anything but text and hyperlinks, it breaks a lot of Web pages. Sometimes, it breaks so much of a page that it renders the page unusable. Surely this is "inconvenient," right?
...Here's the thing: **if a Web page doesn't work in Lynx, it doesn't work for the visitor.** It may be serving a million ads, tracking your every move, or doing a lot of other things that work great for the site's owner. But it's not convenient *for the reader.*
Frogfind and Lynx save me again and again from having to deal with sites that look like the late stages of Stimulation Clicker. When I want to read text, *it only serves text.* That's extremely convenient to me.
Even better: Lynx doesn't load trackers. Lynx doesn't load trackers because it can't. It cannot recognize most trackers as loadable. So long, Meta Pixel.
The only tracker-type item it can come close to loading is cookies, which it offers the user a chance to accept or reject individually. None of this "you can't reject necessary cookies" nonsense.
(Some pages do break if you reject all cookies. But *the user gets the option.* We shouldn't live in a country that offers 80 kinds of dish soap but no opportunity to reject cookies even if they break the page.)
Sure, sometimes I can't read a page in Lynx. When this happens, I have to find another way to read it or find another page. But knowing I can just read text and that absolutely no one can gather data on me while I do? Very convenient to me.
The Cloud Firewall extension for Firefox (and LibreWolf) allows you to block pages served on/with Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, or Cloudflare. When you toggle it to block these pages, the pages will not load. At all. You just get a popup that reminds you that you chose to block pages from that provider.
Cloud Firewall breaks a *huge* percentage of Web sites. I was astonished how many sites I frequented actually use Cloudflare, for instance. The only essential page it's broken for me so far is my bank's, but this is why I also have Ungoogled Chromium.
OpenSnitch is a Linux program that tells you every single time your computer tries to send information over the Internet. The initial run of this tool is...a lot. Over time, it learns what you do and don't accept, and it settles down. At first, though, its interruptions are constant.
I love them both. One of the things I like least about my work computer is that I have to do without either. I would rather know who is behind the Web sites I visit. I want to know when those sites, or my computer, try to respond to information requests from those sites. Knowing when a site runs on some Big Tech company's stuff or when it's trying to send info is very convenient to me.
Gemtext is how one formats text files for Geminispace. It's basically stripped-down Markdown (the stuff you use to format blog posts on Bear).
Once upon a time, WYSIWYG editors were introduced to make marking up text with HTML more "convenient." You can just open the editor and type, and it does all the little pointy bracket tags for you! How convenient!
...Reader, I have *always* disliked WYSIWYG editors. Writing my own HTML structures my thinking. It allows me to ensure the HTML conveys the meaning of my work and not just the formatting.
I infinitely prefer Gemtext.
Gemtext has maybe half the options Markdown does. There's no bold, italic, or underline, for instance. There are only three levels of heading and only unordered (bullet-point) lists. Block quotes are an option. Links can only go on their own line. That's about it.
Yes, Gemtext gives me less control over semantics than HTML. But Gemtext, by disallowing semantic and styling tags, forces me to think about the structure of my writing as well as its sense. The restrictions are freeing.
I'm currently working on setting up space on a tilde server so I can run my Gemini capsule directly from the command line.
Sure, a lot of things in Ubuntu can be done through the GUI, which makes them feel more like one would do them in Windows. But a lot of things can't. For instance, I've loaded far more programs from the terminal than I have from the app service. Some things simply don't exist any other way.
Having to type "sudo apt-get install" to install a program took learning. Learning where to look for programs and what programs I wanted and what to type to get them was a process, too. But I'm completely free of Windows now - an OS that is offensive to use *even when it's been debloated to its bare essentials.* Having two sets of OS skills is pretty convenient to me.
See also: ditching the Google Play store for F-Droid and Aurora OSS. Some things load weird. One app I discovered would not run without the Play Store's blessing *at all*. But being able to put apps on my phone without Google connecting them to me? Having access to a lot more app options via F-Droid than I would through Google Play? Pretty convenient to me. Less so for Google, which isn't getting a 30 percent cut from them, but I really don't care about Google.
Was learning all this "convenient"? Maybe not in the short term. But with so many tech companies showing their hands all at once, it's clearly more convenient to me and my privacy in the long term.
Bottom line: If a company is offering you "seamless," "frictionless" "convenience," there's something in it for them. You handing over your data is more convenient to them than it is to you. Do what is convenient for you - even if it means having to learn some new skills in the short term.
2025 Mar 02
Yesterday, I read this very helpful piece about how to get started with Lynx, a command-line browser.
The piece starts off with a quote that's now stuck in my head:
"If you don't perceive using the Internet in the 2020s to be a constant fight, you have absolutely no online privacy whatsoever."
(FWIW, avoid the logical misstep of assuming the inverse is true. Even if you do perceive using the Internet to be a constant fight, you may have absolutely no online privacy whatsoever.)
I have recently re-committed to the expectation - or demand - that my tech Just Work. "Just Work" has two equally important parts:
WORK: my tech must do what I an using it to do.
JUST: my tech must not do anything except what I am using it do.
Expecting tech to Just Work is also to be in a state of constant war with most tech.
Lynx Just Works. I use it to read text online. It delivers text online. It doesn't report on my reading or keep logs of it.
I debloated my Windows machine yesterday. It didn't Just Work before and it doesn't now. Even after the debloat, it's still borderline offensive to use - and messing around with old DOS software in DOSBox is making me realize just how out of our hands Windows has gotten.
Windows 3.1 was a graphical shell for DOS, basically. It did some of its own stuff, but it felt and acted like a convenience to the user, one that the user could abandon at any time. Everything was adjustable to your liking, right there in Windows itself. I know, because I spent dozens of hours adjusting it, to my mom's annoyance.
(She liked that I gave it a purple color scheme. She did not like that I turned the error noise into Data saying "your sanity is not in question." Sorry not sorry, Mom. Maybe you should have let me have video games.)
Now, even with third-party tools - which I had to go find on GitHub, which is itself a skill - I cannot adjust many things about Windows to suit me. I'm at the mercy of the OS. It does not Just Work.
Or printers.
In hindsight, I don't know why I have put up with my HP printer as long as I have. I do know it has been getting worse over the last couple years. It only prints from the mobile app (yes, even when I Ethernet cabled it to the computer). It pesters me for a dozen "alignment" and "diagnostic" printouts every time I turn it on. The cartridges wear out or dry out or something if I don't use them at least weekly; sometimes I'm lucky to get 20 pages out of them before the printer rejects them. It won't run at all without a working color cartridge, even though I never print in color. It jams almost every single time I print, requiring me to do more printing. Printouts often come out with the "running out of ink" white streaks, even when the cartridges are new, and cleaning it did nothing to help. It occasionally lies to me that it's out of paper, too. Recently - this is a new one - it started lying that it can't print a black and white paper form without photo paper in the photo tray!
I typed "printer without proprietary bullshit" into search this morning, and 500 Reddit comments told me to get a Brother laser printer. Which makes sense to me, honestly. We have one in the library office, and it just prints.
Our office Brother printer doesn't jam. It doesn't lie to me. It doesn't insist on running tedious diagnostics. It doesn't refuse to listen to this or that device. It doesn't clog or "run out of toner" before it's expected to (we once went three years without changing the toner).
It. Just. Prints.
Which I guess shouldn't surprise me. My Brother serger Just Serges, too.
I instantly understood the quote on the Lynx tutorial about being at war with the Internet, because I'd already experienced that as I decoupled my digital life from Big Tech earlier this year. I'm frustrated that I have to be at war with my devices. But here we are.
Good thing I'm stubborn.
2025 Mar 02
Like a lot of people, I've been almost surgically grafted to my smartphone for years. But in the last two months, my habits have changed so much that this may be the beginning of the end of that relationship.
Since taking the library job, I've rediscovered my preference for print books - and now that I have access to over six million titles through the state's interlibrary loan system, I just don't need to download stuff and read it on my phone the way I once did.
Some of my work documents are still digital-only. I review for Booklist, among other things, and they only send digital galleys these days. But those are PDFs, and I have yet to find anything that makes reading PDFs on a phone a not-annoying experience. So I don't read those on my phone anyway.
Since ditching social media, my attention span has grown back - and it continues to improve. I went from barely surviving 1,500-word articles to actually enjoying 15,000-word articles. Ten or twenty pages of the World Book Encyclopedia now go by without my even noticing (the limiting factor is now the arthritis in my hands rather than my attention span). I can watch entire television shows again without jonesing for The Scroll. It's great.
Since rearranging my online life, I'm writing far more than I ever did before. We're talking an extra 3,000 words a day on average on top of the stuff I write for clients. Typing that much on a phone is a no-go; I want my keyboard.
Similarly, making new webpages or updating my existing ones isn't a thing I can comfortably do on my phone. I could make a text document, I guess, but again - I don't want to type that much with my thumbs. Also, when I want to put a lot of links on a page, I don't want to go back and forth between browser and document on a phone. I want to put them side by side on my proper computer screen(s).
And since leaving the "five websites each sharing screenshots of the other four," I'm doing a lot more stuff online that isn't optimized for phone - or even possible on phone. A lot of the best websites-as-art are nigh unreadable on mobile, for instance. When I'm exploring Neocities or Marginalia for ideas, my phone is not the place for it.
I also recently made a Gemini capsule. Today I learned how to use Lynx to browse the Web from the terminal in Linux. Lynx strips out everything but text, which makes some pages not usable. But Lynx also guarantees zero tracking, since it doesn't even recognize trackers as loadable. So I can read all I want without anyone collecting that data.
I can't use LaGrange (my Gemini browser) or Lynx from my phone at all, though. I have to do both on my home computer.
I do still use my phone for a few essentials, like cashing checks and texting with friends and family. It's still in hand every time I travel. Some things about it are still the most convenient or only way to do things - like handle bus fare.
And I'll always need a Microsoft Authenticator-equipped smartphone for work (gag). Though I did learn the other day that Authenticator will still work even if the phone has no SIM card, as long as the phone has an Internet connection. (A fun fact in case you're trying to put some distance between your Authenticator device and your daily driver phone.)
I've spent years hating how much time I spend on my phone, yet unable to put it down. I have a lot of hope that this may indeed be the beginning of that end.
2025 Feb 27
[Full Disclosure: there are no longcats in this post. I'm sorry.]
Since recovering most of my attention span from social media, I've started reading much longer pieces on the Internet. Things like Josh Collinsworth's exhaustive discussion of what's happening at Wordpress (21,608 words including sidebars, per Microsoft Word) and the Project Gemini FAQ (26,955 words, same estimator).
Marketing Brain haaates these, precious. Over 20,000 words? That's far too long for Marketing Brain's comfort. Like ten times too long. Internet content should not be so long, precious. Longness on Internet is for cats. "Longform content" should only be 1,500 to 2,000 words, precious. Anything longer is Content That Has No Name and Must Be Banished.
As a reader, though, I love reading these things. So much so, in fact, that I recently removed the encycloReadia project from Mataroa in favor of putting it on my own website as a single page with anchor links for navigation.
Marketing Brain haaaaates this. Haaaaates. Marketing Brain hates this so much, Marketing Brain gave me anxiety about it over lunch.
"You're not breaking up the content enough for reader's attention spans-" readers can do what I do - leave and come back later. Breaking stuff up into "snackable content" (god how I hate that term!) only contributes to the breakdown of attention spans, and that feels increasingly like a sin.
"You're not giving people a choice whether or not to keep reading-" the back and home buttons are right there. How am I stopping them?
"You're not encouraging engagement with other content on the site-" this site does not exist to "foster engagement," "drive traffic," or anything else. This site exists for me to write stuff on the Web. If other people like it, that's cool, but I don't want or need to know about it.
If anything, I'm saving people from having to reload the header, footer, and CSS every 500 words - a task that has a real (if tiny) financial cost in bandwidth. You're welcome.
"No one will read that-" people already read the whole thing when it was on Mataroa, chopped up into one page per post plus the home page/site index. Are you seriously arguing that doing less work is what will cause people to stop reading? Are you, Marketing Brain?? Have you melted down that badly???
Tl;dr the encycloReadia project has moved, read it if you like, if you don't then look at something else, either way I hope you maximize your own enjoyment of the Web but I am done presuming that I know how to "optimize" others' online experiences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longcat
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt
https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi
https://drmollytov.neocities.org/library/encycloreadia
2025 Feb 18
I have spent my last two lunch breaks, and periodic chunks of my afternoons, on two things:
Reading Josh Collinsworth's exhaustive explanation of the WordPress meltdown, and
Trying to articulate why I deleted every commercial Web 2.0-style site and profile I had - after 20 years of use, in some cases - in favor of a "code it yourself or know the first name of the human who did" approach to the Web.
"Why I left WordPress" has already taken up four single-spaced notebook pages, and that's just the outline. Tl;dr there is a LOT there, ranging from "how I felt the first time I made "10 PRINT "HELLO MOLLY I AM THE COMPUTER" work correctly" to "here's my take on the sexual harassers who made me quit computers for 20 years guess what it is not charitable" to "I can't believe I let myself become exactly the sort of plastic product I was selling."
There's so much it won't fit in one blog post. So much that I'm still teasing it all out, putting it into topics that maybe will fit into single blog posts. So much my therapist will hear long before anyone else does.
But I can name one thing that did not contribute to my decision to delete my personal and business WordPress accounts: Matt Mullenweg's meltdown.
I'm not saying Matt Mullenweg's recent behavior wouldn't have driven me away from WordPress. It is certainly causing me to email clients who are still using .com or .org and asking them if they'll let me migrate them to a new, Automattic-free setup. But Mullenweg's recent behavior didn't drive me personally from WordPress. I'd already made the decision to leave before I learned what was going on.
My rediscovered standard for the software, platforms, tools, and devices I use is that they must "just work." Both those terms carry equal weight.
An item must just work. It must do what I need it to do.
An item must just work. It must do only what I need it to do.
WordPress - whether dot com or dot org - has never "just worked." It's always been somehow both bloated with features I don't need and short on features I do. Most of the things that would make WordPress truly useful as a CMS exist in the form of plugins, which are locked behind paywalls - either the paywall of a "business" .com account or the paywall of hosting costs and using .org.
I tried both with my personal and business sites over the past fifteen years. Neither ever paid for itself. I do have clients who seem to recoup the costs of either a business .com or a .org setup, but it's not all my clients. It's maybe 10% of all the clients whose sites I have ever managed. The rest? Just pay.
Given the current state of the corporate Web, I see Mullenweg's behavior as more of a symptom than a cause. Sure, he's causing a lot of damage to WordPress users, to WP Engine, to the team at Automattic, and most of all to himself. But he's not doing anything unusual or unpredictable. Irrational? Yeah. Unpredictable? No.
Mullenweg is acting like any other spoiled tech billionaire, except he hasn't quite got the billions to back him up. He's playing a role - one every person in his position seems to end up in eventually.
And that's the corporate Web 2.0. It's not people; it's roles. It's not humanity; it's metrics. It's not conversation; it's "engagement." It's not problem-solving; it is, if anything, problem perpetuating, because problems drive engagement.
I left WordPress because I spent so many years swimming in that stuff that I developed a sudden and violent allergy to it. The Matt Mullenweg debacle just reaffirms what I already know: there's no there there.
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt
2025 Feb 16
Today, I made a three-page website on Neocities. The first page is an introduction and index to the other two pages. The other two are my resume and portfolio, respectively.
(I won't link them here because I very much enjoy my small-Web pseudonymity. If you want to hire a copywriter with way too much experience, though, there's always my email.)
I also did some FAQ-reading and migrated the domain name I've had for 15 years off Wordpress and onto the new Neocities site. Now anyone who looks me up under myactualname dot thatwebsite will see the new one, not the Big Shiny Professional Blog I wrote for 15 years.
I'm planning to delete the Big Shiny Blog and my LinkedIn account. Probably this week.
The part of me that worked for the commercial Web for years has some anxiety about the mere thought. Some 13 percent of the world's adults are on LinkedIn, according to this post by Jon Sterling, and commercial web brain is terrified to not be among them. The networking! The contacts! How will people know you exist if you aren't on LinkedIn? DO you exist if you're not on LinkedIn??
...Yes. Because the facts indicate I don't need LinkedIn and never did.
Like Jon Sterling, I was an early adopter of LinkedIn. And in all the time I've had a profile there, I have not made one meaningful business contact or landed a single client, account, or piece of paying work from LinkedIn. Ever.
How valuable can it be, really?
Wordpress was an easier sell to delete for me. I've used it for years, but I've actually never liked it. It's never given me the kind of control I want; I only stayed because I built an early following, back in 2009 or so, and I wanted to keep it. But my subscriber numbers haven't changed in years, and the switch to block editing makes Wordpress even less a thing I want to keep using.
The only reason it took me so long is that I didn't want to lose my domain name. I've had it for over 15 years. I bought it and continually renewed it through Wordpress, and I wasn't sure whether I could leave while maintaining it.
So I did some reading. (Do recommend: the giant resource list at 32bit.cafe.) And now my domain name is free of Wordpress. Took less than an hour.
The most liberating, and perhaps the most dangerous, thing the Web is teaching me is that I can in fact do a lot of things myself. I can write my own website. I can buy a domain name and point it wherever I want it to go. I can communicate with people without needing the world's giant data-scraping sites to do it.
It's liberating because it frees me to do and say what I actually think, rather than creating a sanitized version that some social media giant will accept, or that my family/friends/clients all want to see, or that doesn't get me 50 angry strangers telling me to delete my account.
It's dangerous because it's teaching me that I can do those things, which is going to lead to me thinking I should have some kind of right to do those things, which is Extremely Inconvenient to power.
Good.
https://jonsterling.com/how-to-delete-linkedin-account/
2025 Feb 12
I read Ed Zitron's latest over lunch, and I've been thinking about this paragraph ever since:
> Similarly, there’s comparatively little coverage of the destruction of Google Search or the horrifying state of Facebook and Instagram. While outlets have had dalliances with the collapse of Search — Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic was earlier than most, myself included — these are usually one-and-done features, a momentary “hmm!” in the slop of breaking news and hot takes, if these stories even happen at all. You might argue that one cannot simply write these stories again and again, to which I say “skill issue.” The destruction of products core to the fabric of society is important and should be in the news constantly, in the same way that news outlets happily report on and discuss crime in modern metropolitan areas.
(Emphasis added.)
What I'm wondering is this: Does the gradual decline of the computer experience into near-unusability not come up anymore because it is not distinctively different from the general decline of real life in a similar direction?
I teach in the same school district that, in the previous century, I once attended. Back then, it was one of the best school districts in one of the best-performing states for education in the US. The tax base was strongly, securely middle- to upper-middle class, secured by a GM plant that ran 24/7.
I haven't lived here for most of the intervening 25+ years, but I've returned regularly to see family. During that time, I've watched the place decline. and decline. and decline.
First, GM left. Then No Child Left Behind kneecapped the schools. This state hit recession at least six years before the rest of the US did in 2008, prompting everyone who could leave town to do so. The national/global recession made an existing situation worse. Continual draining and cuts to infrastructure funding, public health, public schools, public libraries, public places, and pretty much everything else with the word "public" in the title has taken its toll.
Today, over 80 percent of the district's students are on free or reduced lunch. I assume every student has a 504 or an IEP unless told otherwise. That's not "made up diagnoses" or "coddling kids," as some would have you believe; that's everyone around here who can afford to leave doing so, leaving behind the kids whom no private school or "schools of choice" district will take.
I have no doubts that I am exactly where I am supposed to be, day job-wise. But I also have no doubts that this district, community, state, and nation are significantly worse off than they were 25 years ago.
And I think the reason it took me so long to see the unforgivable shit they've done to the computer is that it mirrored the unforgivable shit that's been done to the place I grew up. That's been done to every place I have lived since 1999. That's been done to every square inch of the United States of America that does not belong to some billionaire.
This doesn't mean I think pushing back against the unforgivable is pointless. In fact, I think it's now more important than ever. It also doesn't let the media off the hook; if anything, the total decline of the nation in all its forms should be headline news every single day, and media outlets can beat the "how do we keep writing about it?" problem by writing about all of it.
The decline of Literally Everything offers actual years, maybe decades, of material. If you can't write about that daily, you can't write about anything daily and should stop trying to write at all.
It never had to be this way.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-were-fighting-for/
2025 Feb 10
The further I go into my quest away from Big Tech, the more interesting stories I hear and facts I learn.
A friend's 75 year old mother, for instance, just switched to Ubuntu after a lifetime of using Windows. She'd simply had it with all the ads and bloatware Windows crams into its operating system now.
By all accounts, this is a woman who had just enough computer knowledge to reliably answer her email and open Facebook. But she discovered Ubuntu, and with a little help from one of her kids, she installed it.
Similarly, another friend sent me a link today to Abode, the Stuart Semple-backed software suite that seeks to do everything Adobe does - except you can buy this one once and own it forever, instead of paying for subscriptions until you die.
Every time I tell someone about my quest away from Big Tech, they inevitably ask: "But what do you use instead of [insert Big Tech product here]?"
At first, I just told people - but then I realized most people don't even know that many alternate products exist, let alone how they compare to the default Big Tech offerings. So I started showing them instead.
The version of Ubuntu installed on my laptop has a 100% success rate so far in converting my friends and family members to a Linux-based OS. They're blown away by how well it just works.
"Just works" is my new standard for tech, by the way. Whatever the system, tool, or program is, it must just work. It must just work. It must not do anything else than the job I acquired it to do.
Some things that just work for me:
Ubuntu (computer operating system)
GrapheneOS (Android phone operating system)
Proton Mail, Drive, Pass, Calendar, and VPN (email, document management, password management, calendar, and VPN, respectively)
Mailfence (email)
Firefox and Brave (browsers)
DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Kagi (search engines)
F-Droid (source of phone apps)
Aurora Store (anonymous access to Google Play Store)
FreeTube (anonymous YouTube viewer)
LibreOffice (Office, before Microsoft stripped out a third of its functionality to make room for Pretty)
CryptPad (online document management and collaboration with way more security and functionality than Google Drive)
Audacity (audio editing)
Phocid (music player)
Feeder and Mire (RSS feed readers)
VLC Media Player (video and music player)
MuPDFReader (PDF reader)
Organic Maps (maps)
Counter.social (like Twitter if Twitter were actually worth using)
Signal (messaging)
GOG, aka Good Old Games (computer game management - buy them once, own them forever)
a literal kitchen timer that looks like a chicken (instead of "needing" a smart speaker or a smartphone to set timers for me)
two external hard drives (for backup and backup copy, instead of cloud backups - which just put my data on someone else's computer)
I don't have a replacement solution for everything people ask for. For example, I've never used cloud-based photo storage in my life, so I don't have a good suggestion (though I have heard good things about Ente Photos). Also, I'm still looking for an e-reader app for my phone that I genuinely like. Must have no ads and offer scroll mode. Suggestions are gratefully appreciated.
But even when I'm still looking for the perfect replacement, I trust that it's out there somewhere - or that, if I really wanted to, I could make my own. (See: my plans to create my own games/streaming management device on a Raspberry Pi.)
That's the thing. A combination of advertising and massive spends to position themselves as the "defaults" have got us all assuming that Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are the only games in town.
They aren't. They really, really are not.
We never needed the tech oligarchs. It's past time we reminded them of that.
2025 Feb 09
I've seen headlines and references to "social media addiction" for years, but I always dismissed them as inflammatory. After all, I'd taken long breaks from Facebook at various times. I'd gone months at a time forgetting I even had a Twitter account. I used Instagram for maybe five minutes, and I am sufficiently Old that I never got the hang of Snapchat or Tiktok.
Then I cut off all my social media accounts.
When I left for good, the only ones remaining were Pinterest (where I never socialized with anyone, ever), Tumblr, and Reddit. I also deleted my Amazon account and removed the Libby and Hoopla apps from my phone. I'd discovered that when I was bored and in doomscrolling mode, I'd doomscroll anything with an endless feed - and when that feed was Amazon, I nearly always ended up buying things.
That was about two weeks ago, and wow was I wrong about the "addiction" thing.
I assumed that, even if humans in general could get addicted to social media, I wasn't. After all, I'd muted notifications years ago. I keep my phone screen in greyscale unless I really need to see things in color. I don't remember the last time I had an actual social media app on my phone; I've read them all in the browser since sometime in the 2010s. (In fact, I quit Facebook entirely when Facebook's mobile browser experience got so bad it rendered the site unusable.) Surely it wouldn't be that big a deal to just not have social media accounts anymore, right?
Wow. Wrong.
I keep catching myself automatically doing habitual "social media checking" behaviors, like picking up my phone, opening the lock screen, and staring at it for a second before remembering "the thing you are looking for is not here."
I've had several mood swings - sudden, inexplicable anger; depression-flavored La Croix; bursts of anxiety bordering on panic. Usually they're related to those times I reflexively pick up my phone. Or to times I would check my phone, except there's nothing there to see.
I nearly cried the first day after I deleted everything, when I had four whole minutes to spare before a church service started and I had (deliberately) left my phone in the car. That's right: I couldn't sit four minutes in a gorgeously decorated room with a view of a lake right outside the window without jonesing for The Scroll.
I've also been having insomnia. For the past week, my brain has felt the need to wake up at 5:30 a.m. Which would be fine - my usual wakeup time is 6:15 anyway - except that it won't go to sleep until after 11.
I joined a couple Internet forums when I quit social media, because I didn't want to quit online socializing entirely. But none of them have mobile sites, and their format makes them difficult to navigate on a phone. Which was the point when I joined them. I'm trying to train myself to go back to a 1990s "going on the computer" mode of behavior, where email/forum checking/website updating is something I do on a computer, not from my phone.
I've caught myself opening those forums several times, trying to recreate the social media endless scrolling experience.
It took me several days and a couple Internet searches to semi-confidently define it as withdrawal. I've never actually had withdrawal symptoms from anything before. But I have no other explanation.
The worst part (to me)? I don't want to be back on any of those sites. I don't want to scroll mindlessly forever in lieu of doing an actual thing, often to end up spending money I don't have.
My life has improved dramatically in the two weeks or so I've been off social media. I've noticed exactly how cheap the imitation of satisfaction is in the endless-scroll feeds. How pale and sickly it is compared to the actual satisfaction of, say, tweaking my own HTML, or baking cupcakes, or brushing the pets, or literally anything that isn't engineered to keep me scrolling.
These sites are designed to give our brains just enough satisfaction to keep us hooked - but never so much that we step away pleased with a job well done. My mood, my mental stamina, my creativity, my work, and my relationships are better off without them. I'm doing better in every identifiable way.
Except these pesky symptoms.
Years ago, I went through the chronic pain rehabilitation program at the Cleveland Clinic. When I entered, I was on very few meds, but many of my fellow attendees were working their way off various medications - usually opioid painkillers.
I remember the doctor reassuring one patient, whose withdrawal symptoms were particularly stubborn: "This is the only thing I treat that has a one hundred percent success rate. The symptoms will go away. It just takes time."
I repeat this to myself when I find myself staring at my phone screen like it told me my dog just died. It takes time.
After all, I was a rat in the cage, pressing the cheap dopamine bar, for over a decade. It's okay if my brain needs a few weeks to get over that particular form of torture.
2025 Feb 07
At home and on my phone, my default search engine is set to DuckDuckGo. I also use Kagi and Startpage.
Because DuckDuckGo is my default, I still have the habit of typing searches directly into the address bar. I just did this at work, where absolutely everything we use is Google, not thinking about the fact that it would give me a Google search.
And wow, do I find that Google AI "search result" annoying.
The work I do requires rigorous, trustworthy citations - so the AI search result is absolutely useless to me. Worse, I've been doing this work long enough to have a pretty deep knowledge of the stuff I look up to cite. The AI results are more often than not either (a) concerningly incomplete or (b) flat wrong.
Google aspires to replace its search engine results with this thing. Google's goal is to create a "search engine" that offers you only its AI hallucinations, instead of the lists of links on which the Web is built.
And of course there is no way to turn it off without having special "early access" to Google Labs. (The only other recommendations I found were to change browsers or install a blocking extension, neither of which are options on a work device or network.)
I definitely have some strong opinions about privacy and security at my workplace - enough that they'll be another post/manifesto/screed at some point. I certainly did not intend this blog to become a catalog of personal encounters with enshittification. Yet here we are. Blame Google.
2025 Feb 06
I've been writing for pay since I was 17. For 25+ years, writing has made up some part of my yearly income. For over ten years, writing made up 100% of my yearly income.
Most of that writing was done for the Web. Not the personal, people-driven small web, but the big, commercialized Web of Selling People Things. The Web of Engineering People's Behavior So They See More Ads and Buy More Things. The Web of What Sells.
That Web ruined my writing.
It wasn't so much SEO that did it. I actually find it easy to write people-focused work that also uses sufficient keywords to get a search engine's attention.* Rather, it was the demand for the sort of surface-level, slightly urgent cadence so common in commercial sites.
Go read any article at The Spruce or Bustle, or any law firm blog, and you'll see what I mean. It's a superficial, plasticky approach designed to give the reader just enough information to get them to buy something or to click the next article - but never enough information to satisfy them.** It pretends to be "useful content" without being usable content. The writing is a product, not a conversation.
When I started writing here, I intended to grab the most popular articles from my Big Professional Blog and re-post them here. The "most popular" ones had to be the best, right? The most worthy of preservation? The ones humanity somehow needed me to continue offering access to?
I was so deep in the sauce I didn't even see what I'd become.
Now, a week after starting this blog and about a month after abandoning Big Tech sites, I cannot imagine inflicting those pieces on all of you. Writing-as-sales-product is not what a people-focused Web is or ever will be about.
I'm going to save a couple on my Neocities site as a testament to the crap I used to write. I'm also going to save some of the posts that felt "too weird" when I posted them (and that did badly!).
Even better, since leaving social media/Big Tech, starting this blog and joining a few small-web forums, I'm noticing significant changes in my brain and my writing. And it's only been a week.
I'm calmer. My attention span is better. I get genuine satisfaction from both my online and offline activities.
My stamina for big projects has skyrocketed. Yesterday, I outlined one for my website, titled "Breaking Away from Big Tech." My goal is to lay out all the steps I'm taking and tools I'm using.***
It's going to be a much larger project than I originally anticipated. I'm estimating the final piece will be north of 30,000 words. Not the longest thing I've ever written, but the longest thing I've ever written for the Web.
Plasticky Corporate Product-Writer Me would never have had the patience for such a project. Big Professional Blog is littered with similar projects I started but never finished. Plastic Me needed pieces to go up quickly so they Generated Page Views and thus Income.
One of my ad agency colleagues called these pieces "snackable content." The phrase made my skin crawl then. It still does. Always snacking, never a meal.
Before, blogging 30,000+ words on a single piece would have felt like too much work for too little reward. Now, the work is the reward.
...It's been 25 years since I've said that about writing.
Writing in HTML, rather than in a WYSIWYG editor, has been good for me too. There's something about having to incorporate all the tags and structure that structures my writing, too.
I haven't written just because I want to since the previous century. Literally. I have not written like this since the 1990s.
It's great.
2025 Feb 02
One of the many tasks on my to-do list today was to install Ubuntu on the last Windows device in the house: my behemoth Dell desktop computer.
I forgot that Windows 11 enabled Bitlocker by default.
In case you're unfamiliar (as I was, apparently!), Bitlocker is Windows 11's full disk encryption. Basically, it turns everything on your hard drive into random noise for someone who doesn't have the password.
Full disk encryption is, generally speaking, a good security measure. Having Bitlocker encrypting your hard drive means that if you lose your computer or someone steals it, that someone can't access your tax returns, emails with your doctor, or collection of "hamsters wearing Speedos" gifs. It may suck to lose your computer, but your entire life isn't compromised for it.
Of course, what happens when someone tries to install a new OS when Bitlocker is active is that the hard drive locks down. Then you need a recovery key. Microsoft will make you prove your identity in multiple ways before giving you a recovery key. Again, probably a good thing for your security, if inconvenient.
Then you have to decrypt the hard drive. This takes time. Mine has been at it for four hours now and is about 2/3 done.
I got really frustrated when all this happened. It took me a couple hours and a hard cleaning of my kitchen to figure out why. Why was I so annoyed, when what happened was that full-disk encryption and recovery worked exactly the way it was designed to do, and the mistake (trying to install Ubuntu without decrypting first) was entirely my own?
Finally I realized: I was annoyed because I was never given a notice that Bitlocker was running, nor was I given the chance to opt in or out.
Yet again: for the average user, this might not be a terrible thing. But it doesn't sit well with me. It's yet another example of tech companies deciding what is good for us. Deciding what we need. Deciding which inconveniences (like sitting through a full hard drive decrypt) we'll just have to tolerate if we're going to use their products - and the vast majority of us will have no choice other than to use their products.
I'd eat my mistake and move on if I had been alerted and given the chance to change my settings from the start. But I wasn't. I messed up due to the lack of alert or option. I messed up due to unnecessary paternalism from a tech company that already owns far too much of my data and attention.
It's going to feel very good to install Ubuntu on that machine.
2025 Feb 02
I read Olia Lialina's From My to Me this morning, and I was struck by her point that "no-coding-required" website design tools took something from us - the artistic tools required to do anything our hearts desired on "our own" webpages. Rather, we're limited by the tools and templates provided.
Whatever we make will fall within the boundaries of what the service's creators think "a webpage" should look like. These boundaries may be flexible, but they exist. They constrain our options, and they also train us to believe "a webpage" can only look like one thing or one range of things.
Lialina discusses this to emphasize how Wordpress downplays and even destroys hyperlinks. I, however, immediately thought of AI.
Suppose fifty people in a room were all asked to make an image of a "purple kitten with yarn ball." We'd undoubtedly get fifty variations on this theme, some of them way out there. We'd see a variety of media and interpretations. We could, and probably would, discuss how easy or difficult certain media were to use. We'd almost certainly discuss whether some interpretations were more effective than others, and we'd inevitably ask "More effective at what?"
Now compare this to AI-generated images.
When someone types "purple kitten with yarn ball" into an AI generator, they may well get an image of a purple kitten with a yarn ball. Yet this image does not encompass all possible interpretations of the prompt. It encompasses only the training data tagged "purple," "kitten," "yarn," and/or "ball."
In short, the generated image is, and will only ever be, within the bounds of what the system is trained to tell us a purple kitten with yarn ball should look like.
The prompt-typer will never get the "purple kitten with yarn ball" inside their own head. They can't. The AI cannot produce it. The AI can only keep us within the AI's own boundaries. Ultimately, the AI can only train us to believe a "purple kitten with yarn ball" - or any other prompt - looks like a certain thing.
There's no discussion, no media, no debating effectiveness or asking who the target audience is or to what extent the artist succeeded at communicating with that audience. There's no there there.
I built my Big Professional Blog in Wordpress. When I started, Wordpress would provide access to the raw CSS and HTML with the click of a button. I loved this feature and used it frequently.
A few years ago, Wordpress went to "block editing." Block editing treats everything on the screen as an "element" you can change by choosing from a lengthy menu.
I don't know whether this was actually meant to help users or was just a way to make people spend more time in the CMS. I do know that access to the original (perfectly functional) WYSIWYG editor became buried in some obscure menu, and access to the raw HTML got even further away. Even I stopped accessing the HTML for a few years, because the hassle wasn't worth it.
...Just typing that gives me pause. Accessing the HTML on my own website wasn't worth it to me? This is what Wordpress stuck me with?? And I accepted it???
Yeah. No. I'm done with that. Give me back my tools; I want to make art.
https://interfacecritique.net/book/olia-lialina-from-my-to-me/
2025 Feb 01
Since the start of January, I have:
deleted my Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Wordpress, and Meta* accounts (I ditched Twitter a while ago)
divested myself of browsers and search engines associated with the above mega-companies
got new, secure email accounts to handle private stuff, logins and accounts, and trash respectively
hunted down and deleted as many of my unused accounts on various sites as I could find
set up a Privacy.com account for masked online shopping and worked out a budget that has me using cash for nearly all other purchases
got a VPN and password manager
set up SimpleLogin for email aliases
installed Ubuntu on my home computers
installed F-Droid and AuroraOSS on my phone to avoid using the Google Store
deleted every app from my phone that has a browser-accessible counterpart
started using an RSS reader for the first time since Google Reader got Tuvix'd
started blogging here
moved my only other essential web page (my portfolio) to static HTML at Neocities
And I have the following works in progress:
talking all my friends into moving to Signal with me
acquiring a new phone that will allow me to install a custom ROM, thus freeing my phone from Google
These are major changes, and I'm glad I made them. They have reignited my joy in the Internet - and they have made my offline life better too.
Yet, as with any big change, they also come with Big Feelings. Now that the claws of Big Tech are loosening, I'm starting to understand just how badly the "five sites sharing screenshots of the other four" have messed with me all these years.
I keep recovering little memories I thought I lost. None of them are good. Times I ignored my baby niece (who is 16 now) for my phone. All the times Spouse and I scrolled or shared Facebook arguments with one another - all the time we lost together. The years I spent writing the most plastic Internet slop for my Big Professional Blog - not even for SEO purposes so much as because I bought the lie that that was what the people wanted.
Web 2.0 literally changed the way I write. The thing I have done for a living since I was 17. And I let it.
I don't blame myself. I'm not sure what else I would have done, given the circumstances. But I grieve.