I have a confession to make.
As much as I love FOSS, privacy, etc, I have surrendered myself to big tech. But hey, that’s changing :D
This blogpost got a bit longer than I expected but it outlines my migration from a big social media platform called Reddit to the fediverse way back in 2022/2023, and why I had to recently do this again yesterday with my search engine.
This migration stuff is a work in progress across the board because change is something I find very hard and time consuming. I plan to migrate a few more things soon!
The (lack of) Boundaries
I have a LinkedIn account to safeguard empl*yment prospects(please let me cope), an Instagram account to watch the reels my friends send me, etc.
I also (eventually) cut out platforms that are actively harmful for me, or worse, show that they wish to exploit my one-sided active attachment to the platform, like reddit blocking custom clients and xitter charging for the API access. This was way back in 2022 when I first discovered the fediverse!
The story of Reddit
I spent a good chunk of my teenage years on reddit, before the “Snoopocalypse”.
Here is some reading material on what I’m talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit_API_controversy
During the early “AI race”, when everyone was in a goldrush to place dibs on good high info datasets, reddit seemed like an excellent RAG and training data source. Reddit sensed this and closed off API access for free, which was kind of a middle finger to people like me and also moderators keeping the platform alive.
This is something I find unacceptable because I was actively spending a sizeable portion of my day at the time on the platform. The default client sucked, both on performant devices and old low-ram phones. It would slow the phone down, or show so much scroll jank and other issues.
I used a couple of custom clients at the time(first boost for reddit and eventually settled on Infinity for reddit), and realized that this experience was so much better than the reddit application. I was free! Free from lag, from terrible terrible apps. I would’ve dropped the platform ASAP if custom clients didn’t come to my rescue.
When they introduced this, it felt like a massive, massive betrayal, so much so that I eventually deleted my account with some 70 to 100k karma(which isn’t a lot for a regular poster) and a couple of free NFTs(yikes lmao who even cares about that) without thinking too much about it… And took a leap of faith to the fediverse!
The Fediverse, and what it was at the time
I was quite addicted to reddit at the time, as it had everything from happenings around my city, anime girls, cool recipes, electronics, Linux stuff and everything else I could dream of.
There was one option I found that make sense: Lemmy. The concept of the “fediverse” was new to me at the time.
Lemmy is reddit, but on the fediverse. Same community system(like subreddits) with the benefit that I could browse communities from other instances, assuming mine did not defederate or vice versa.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
I’m not gonna go too deep into this but I’ll just leave you with the words “bakchodi.org”. I have no horse in this race either way, I want to just social my media in peace so it was clear I don’t wanna be anywhere near them
https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues/165
Eventually, I left Lemmy(I still have an account on programming.dev but I rarely use it) because the instance I started with went down(Lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz) they even had an okbuddybaka 😭
Even today, the fediverse stuck with me, and I use mastodon(infosec.exchange) as my main social media platform.
Hmm but what even is the fediverse?
This does a wayyyyy better job of explaining it than me: https://jointhefediverse.net/learn/
My friends hate this comparison but I feel this is apt: the fediverse is a universe of social networks where each server is in a polycule and exchanges your data to maintain a synced state across the activitypub network(posts, favorites which are similar to likes, boosts which are retoots, etc).
Okay, we get it
You don’t like big tech but you use them. What’s this blog even meant to be about?
Up until yesterday, I used to use google as my primary #searchengine. I tried to move away to my own home-hosted and VPS hosted #searxng instances back in early 2023 but it did not stick.
I kept trying to ditch Google but I was never happy with the alternatives. It just felt different.
Until yesterday. I was sick of the constant captchas I was getting through Google.com not liking the cromite browser I was using on my phone or that I don’t have an account logged in.
I realized that the circumstances were quite similar and felt an urge to switch.
Now I’m on DuckDuckGo. It’s a nice, simple life :D