Fight and Flight from Big Tech
Full disclaimer right off the bat: I consider myself somewhat mediocre. Perhaps a handful or more of people who know me might show appreciation for my personality/tastes, but I can't claim to be an influencer - I don't have the charisma for that. While I happen to tick multiple minority boxes, seldom did I receive any "DEI peeks", yet that's a strong reason why I'm going through what I'll describe here.
For a long time, I wasn't smart enough to be concerned about my privacy and security. I was just another European user using American Big Tech products and services all day long.
Everything changed in this Gregorian calendar year, 2025 AD.
It's funny I can't find the link of the article anymore, but I read back in February about how if Trump were to declare total war on the EU, Microsoft then could just lock down, infect, or otherwise sabotage all EU computers running recent Windows versions!
Then I read about how Trump sacked a board that took care of American companies' compliance with EU's GDPR. A few months later, Microsoft closes down the accounts of one Hague jury who ruled against the Netanyahu regime. More recently, a French judge from the ICC, Nicolas Caillou, woke up one day banned from just about everything American, even credit cards!
The writing's on the wall: economic globalism and laissez-faire capitalism are over, us Europeans don't have digital sovereignty, we're way too dependant on American Big Tech. Something we should have been concerned about during the first reign of Trump, but most of us took for granted that business will go as usual...
Whoever is reading this may oray not be already aware of #BuyFromEU, #BoycottUnitedStates et al. Enough context, now let me turn to my own struggle...
I had different plans, but I ended up postponing them all for the sake of gaining a modicum of genuine digital freedom. Granted, I thought it will take only a month or two, at most, to change a few services and habits; I had no idea how many rabbit holes I would end up exploring.
2025 has been the year of the Linux desktop for me too - you must have expected hearing it, eh?
In earnest, it took me a couple of months to take a leap of faith away from Windows, after three decades of putting up with it. Back in my childhood, I'd hear and read a bit about Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS - but I never seriously considered switching from Windows. Once I used to taunt my dad that I want MacOS (it was the pinnacle of good looks for me at the time), but we were and still are too poor for Apple. At one point, while using my dad's computer, I wish I was able to customize it - but I didn't rebel, I didn't bother to develop a sense of IT independent from him. Ironically, when I moved out of my hometown, dad gave him, alongside a Windows CD, also a CD with Linux Mint on it, though more for the purpose of troubleshooting - never used it back then.
During this last Ramadan, I suffered from a bad enough fever that I stayed for a couple of weeks at home. I told myself this is the moment - and so I installed Mint. At first, just on my main desktop, then within a month I'd also convert my other two computers. Except for a few little issues with GRUB and with one of my HDDs, the whole process went unexpectedly smooth. I took it as a blessing being able to run such a stable and pretty well-rounded OS without having to pirate it!
This was only the beginning of an actual revolution in how I interact with the technology; I did adopt Linux at first just to get away from Microsoft (which I had always suspected of being problematic, yet I hadn't done anything about it until now) and I could have sticked to using Mint as a casual person... but I ended up deriving so much dopamine from reading about Linux and all that one can do with it, that within months I became an enthusiast - lover of software like never before - and a conscious user, one capable of preparing for even a scenario where I might migrate away from Linux.
That is why, upon learning about Emacs later during the year, I have decided to gradually move my workflow into Emacs, which I'll be then able to carry with me from a computer to another, from an OS to another. LibreOffice I had already been using before Linux, but a bunch of streamers persuaded me that learning Emacs would change how I write.
I'll write some other time more about Emacs, but the next blog post is going to be about my quest for security and finding the right OS for it...
And yet this post isn't over. I'll try to keep it briefer now...
What about the hardware? Well, European hardware is a pipe dream for now, and I do still write now from a Pixel that's running GrapheneOS (more on that in the next post). Now there's an emerging thing called RISC-V - a set of open-source architectures for the CPU. A researcher called Gabriel Somlo already demonstrated that there can be a fully open-source self-hosted computer, albeit with limitations. For the nearer future though, all I can do is wait for an European company to put out a decent enough RISC-V SBC - probably it's going to be a CHERI system, look it up!
I haven't got my own homelab to really self-host things... Auth server, NAS, Pihole, Jellyfin and other Docker stuff... This is all still new to me, but I'm getting there!
Social media, cloud and mail services - these used to be exclusively American for me. Now, unlike with Linux versus Windows, for the time being I am still constrained to use the American platforms - because most people are still stuck on them - alongside the decentralized versions of the fediverse (more on that in a sec). However, with ID verification becoming a thing almost overnight (my country is also going to impose it in not too long time; them and the EU should be prosecuted for this someday if there's going to be any justice), I will just refuse it, dodge, abstain.
While my cloud/mail transition is still a big WIP that I'm not happy with yet, I've managed to become fairly savvy with the fediverse.
I'm glad I didn't become too involved with Bluesky and correctly predicted that it's going to suffer from too much centralization - but I do have respect for the cool people behind Blacksky, Northsky, Red Dwarf, anisota, Graze and other cool things out there that happen to exist on ATproto, despite ATproto and Bluesky being rather dubious...
Normally, you'd think I'll go on to say I prefer Mastodon. Actually, Mastodon sucks too, just a little less, and I learned it early on. I also tried other alternatives. Right now, you can find me on two particular instances: fe.disroot.org, which runs Akkoma with Manganese front-end - way better experience than vanilla Mastodon -, and hub.workersofthe.world, which runs Hubzilla - one of the best fediverse software out there, except it's not as neat as Akkoma or Mastodon for navigating federated posts (more on that in some other future post, inshaAllah).
Decentralized/peer-to-peer networking protocols off the clearnet, such as Tor, I2P, Hyphanet, Freenet, DN42, Yggdrasil, Reticulum - that's yet another rabbit hole I can't elaborate on right now (all I'm going to say is I'm not a fan of Tor), and the same goes with the topic of Matrix (the quasi-Discord protocol) versus old-school IRC versus newer secure instant messaging services - Briar, Session, SimpleX, Tox and whatnot... (note to self to not forget about Delta Chat)
That's all I could write for now! Take care, stay safe!
P.S. As I wrote the above last night within a limited timeframe and tried to get done with the infodumping, I didn't even get to express my gratitude towards Allah (SWT) - thus I have managed to stay away from depression, focused on my goals - and towards my parents - thanks to them, I could get hold of this phone and the new PC, at a time when my finances are still a whole struggle!
I didn't get more into the emotional side of my story here, as the text reflects accurately my state of having accumulated information tirelessly while kind of numbed emotionally to the slow-motion free fall of the wretched world I used to know...