Are you in control of your digital life, or is it controlling you?
Who decides what you see online?
What information is being collected about you?
Like many, I'm going through a phase of re-evaluating my interaction with social media and to some extent, computer technology as a whole. I'm not entirely "degoogling," like some are trying to do, rather I'm trying to tailor my digital life to me instead of the other way around. I don't want to be fed a "curated" stream content that some algorithm has decided that I'm most likely to "engage" with, but rather content I want contant that I want to see, in a format that I've chosen to see it in.
I want control.
Blogs
One step towards achieving this goal is what you're reading now. This blog. I decided on the software. I built the server that it's running on. I picked the ugly colors (unless you're reading this via gopher). I can delete posts, create new posts, or destroy the blog entirely. There are no trackers, ads, AI, or other garbage unless I decide that there should be. This doesn't get the readership that I would if I were writing this on Facebook, but the few people who do read it are reading it because they want to, and that's what's important.
I've also started following other blogs, too, some of which are listed in the "Links" section in the menu to the left. Reading personal blogs is great, because you're just reading what a person wrote. There's no algorithm, it's just delivering whatever they typed straight into your eyeballs.
Websites
I maintain my personal homepage and I've been visiting other personal websites. While I personally self-host my homepage, sites like Neocities are making it easy for individuals to create personal webpages without needing to manage a webserver themselves. Searching for new personal homepages can be a little difficult compared to massive SEO'd sites, but services like "webrings" can help you find other similar homepages and provide plenty of rabbit holes to travel down. My homepage is part of the "No AI" webring, whose membership consists of personal pages free of AI generated content.
I still use gmail, it's true, but I now interact with it through Thunderbird. I know that doesn't remove all of the Google tracking and whatnot, but it does allow me to access my email in a presentation that I prefer, and it allows me to use PGP/GPG, which does prevent Google from reading my emails, if it's actually used. Unfortunately I don't receive many PGP encrypted emails, but I've published my public key and my domain supports WKD, so it's easy to access if anyone wants to use it. My address is just "me" @ this domain, by the way, if anyone wants to send something my way.
RSS Feeds
Another advantage to Thunderbird is the built-in RSS reader. Instead of visiting, say, reddit.com, I can import my favorite subreddits directly into Thunderbird as RSS feeds, as well as following other blogs, podcasts, forums, and so-on. No ads, no trackers, just the content I actually want to see.
Fediverse
Of course the Fediverse has to play a role. The "fediverse" is a network of social media applications that can all communicate with each other. It's sort of like if Facebook, Reddit, Snapchat, Youtube, ~~Twitter~~ "X", and so on were all interconnected… Except that each service is actually composed of thousands of individually-owned servers instead of a massive server farm owned by a single entity. If I decide to take down my server, my posts will eventually disappear but the fediverse will live on. No single entity controls the fediverse. Owning the server also means that I control the server. I can decide not to federate (interact with) other servers or limit which servers I want to federate with. I'm in control of my own social media.
SearXNG
"SearXNG is a metasearch engine, aggregating the results of other search engines while not storing information about its users." Essentially, instead of directly using Google or Bing, I search via my own SearNGX server which will create a new "identity" for every search, aggregate the results from dozens of other search engines, and then strip out all of the ads and sponsored results. That means I can search for things like "political news" and get results from all across the internet without getting blasted with advertisements for MAGA baseball caps for the next month.
Last thoughts
Breaking away from major social media and massive corporate entities isn't easy (or even totally feasible) I do feel a lot better knowing that I have al little more control over this aspect of my digital life.