My Attempt at Independence from Big-Tech

I've been trying to stay ahead of the great enshittifcation of the 2020s by moving towards services and solutions that minimise service providers incentives to enshittify. During the process I thought a lot about the incentives involved, created some rules of thumb and discovered some cool services, which I wanted to talk about in this post.

Why Does Thee Enshittify

Why services enshittify has been covered in-depth before, the original post by Cory Doctorow from 2022 is still a great read, and it captures the essence of the issue:

When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left.

(from "Social Quitting", Cory Doctorow, 2022)

Taking this as our axiom #1, we can then formulate our first theorem:

Minimising switching cost also directly minimises the maximum enshittification a platform can get away with and is hence desirable.

And since capitalism means that every decision to maximise profits will be taken eventually (axiom #2), we can come up with theorem #2:

The Maximum enshittification a platform can get away with will always be reached eventually.

It is hence trivial to see that we need to minimise lock-in and switching costs if we want to escape enshittifcation.

I know that some people prefer to "ride the wave while it's good", which I can see why it's enticing. I disagree with this statement though, digging into why might be worth another post.

Rules to Stay Ahead

I recently told someone that I don't have a Spotify account, after which they asked me what App I use to listen to music. Half-way through telling them about this wonderful but weird music player I found¹, I realised that I actually don't really care about the App. I care about the Data.

What I mean by this is that the actually important bit about my "music app" is not about the app at all. It's the fact that I have a couple thousand music files organised on some hard drive somewhere, and I can use whichever app I please to organise, listen and stream them. I can do whatever I want with them because (1) I own the files, and (2) they are in a well-known and widely supported format. For me, this is what really counts.

I keep my notes in Markdown. The app I use to edit them doesn't really matter. I use Obsidian for this, but I am conscious about all the non-standard extensions obsidian has, like their canvas and tables format, and I steer away from these, as they serve as a great lock-in tool. I might use them if alternative implementations crop up and the format gets standardised. For now I am content without them.

Similarly, the "app" for "syncing" my notes also doesn't really matter. I use git for now, but I can simply switch to manage them through nextcloud instead if I so desire.

So what do I use?

I touched on a few things already in this post, but here's a semi-complete list of tools/platforms I use for managing stuff:

• Nextcloud as my cloud, I currently use the Hetzner Managed Nextcloud (Hetzner Storage Share), but might switch away if need be. It's about 5€/month for 1TB, which is very reasonable imho.
  • I use Nextclouds calendar and contacts plugin to sync my calendars and contacts across devices. This uses CalDAV and CardDAV internally, meaning I can switch to another service without too much of a hassle.
  • I use Nextclouds music app to enable Ampache/Subsonic music streaming on the server side, and just use whichever app I fancy on my phone for listening.
• I use Migadu.com to host my e-mail. They do a "bring your own e-mail, we provide the mailserver" thing which I very much enjoy.
  • I use Thunderbird on my laptop/desktop and K9-Mail on my phone.
• I have about 1MB in markdown notes, covering everything from meeting minutes, letter drafts, notes on people I meet to my journal.
  • This is synced with git and edited with Obsidian
• I use darktable to develop my raw pictures, and I share finished pictures with my self-hosted (and self-written) tool. This tool creates static html files that can be hosted with any webserver you like.
• My website is hand-written HTML, my blog is edited in Obsidian and then converted to static HTML with my own static site generator.
• I use GitHub to host most of my code, but I am slowly drifting away to my own gitea/forgejo instance I self-host.
• I use pass as my password manager, it works great, and I make use of the fact that git is a peer-to-peer protocol to sync my various devices.
  • Since I don't trust my phone very much, I have a separate keepassxc vault for phone-related credentials that I sync to it via my NextCloud.
• I have a server running wireguard to connect my various devices and allow them to talk to each other without much hassle.

My server and my laptop and my desktop are all running NixOS, which comes highly recommended. I simply love it.