Living according to values
==========================

September 18, 2024

We, humans, are hypocrites and it's okay. To be a human is hard. There are many
cases in every situation, it's a mistake to see everything naively in black
and white. But it's important to notice personal hypocrisy and reassess the
personal values on a regular basis and live according to them. I want to write
down steps I've made in this direction.

I value privacy. And over years it became a some kind of obsession and hobby.
A never-ending journey to go deeper and thinking what and how I can do better.
I think the first important step was a migration from Gmail to an alternative
email service — Fastmail. It took changing emails everywhere and a long
transition period forwarding emails to new address.

The next one, even more important, is https://grapheneos.org. Thanks I bought
Pixel. Not only it sandboxes Google Play Store, improves security, provides
granularity in sense of settings scopes and reduces tracking as much as
possible, it also helped me to completely abandon Google account. The only
thing besides GMail I was using Google Photos which I replaced with
https://ente.io. Also 1TB hdd, yeah.

After a few years of using Fastmail I decided to cancel the subscription. The
main motivation was their attempt to cooperate with the Russian government to
avoid being blocked in Russia. I decided it's not the compromise I want to see
from an online service I use especially since they tried to do it preemptively.
Also they are from Australia which is far from the privacy values (my general
impression, maybe I'm wrong).

I've moved to iCloud because they provided $1 subscription allowing to use
a custom domain. It was a temporary solution to find a better replacement
which in the end is https://protonmail.com.

A bit later I've installed https://asahilinux.org on my Macbook M1 Pro, coming
back to linux after almost 10 years of osx experience. Works fine for me. This
helped to delete iCloud account as well.

I also have tried to delete as many accounts as possible on all websites I ever
used. Turned out it might be not so easy sometimes. I also changed usernames
where it's possible to reduce the links. Some kind of debt by using the same
username for about 15 years.

For example I deleted LinkedIn, because it's almost completely useless. I've
found a job using it only once for all these years of email spam. Not worth it.
Also dropped Twitter because it became useless when all interesting people went
to Mastodon but I decided not to follow them. Got tired of social media. I read
books instead.

Same with github. I dislike the current data harvest situation with LLM hype.
Also I don't contribute much nowadays and if I want to I would rather
contribute to projects hosted on a private gitlab instance (such as GHC) to
decentralize the open source projects. Sending patches over email also works.
I host all my personal code on my own digital ocean instance via gitweb. 
Using my own VPS allows to host my website, personal gitweb, and AdGuard DNS
instance, allowing me easily to inspect, filter and block all tracking domains.

Instead of Spotify I've started buying music on Bandcamp which means that my
money reach artists directly without awful Spotify distribution schemes. Hello
old offline audio players. I use https://powerampapp.com for Android. It also
helped me to start collecting vinyl records.

The trickiest part so far is to migrate from Telegram to Signal. The network
effect is strong in this domain and not many people willing to install one more
messaging app. But if people care about my values and respect my choices they
will do it. I will delete Telegram account as well in some near future
(UPD. deleted it the next day) and I acknowledge that it's kind of social
suicide as a lot of people and communitiesuse it. But I don't care. Telegram
became a social media app and all I want is a good messaging app that provides
privacy.

Overall this whole journey is an attempt to live according to my core values.
To care about privacy, avoid corporations, using open source, choose small
businesses and support nonprofit organizations (donate to Signal!). It hurts
and it's okay. It also aligns well with my desire to spend more time offline.
The current state of web feels unhealthy and active enshittification is
depressing.