My word it's been a while since I've done a post here hasn't it? Indeed, it's only been three posts since I migrated this from WordPress to the Pelican Static Site generator, and one of those three posts was talking about doing that! Even more disgraceful is realising that was ten years ago!
So it's definitely time to get more active on here again, especially as I have been busy working at decentralising (and de-risking) from US based services. Ever since Elon bought Twitter and I moved to Mastodon (discovering ActivityPub and the Fediverse) this way of working felt like home. The way the internet used to be. This, combined with the rapid descent into authoritarian fascism by the United States government (and by proxy of capitulation from most US based tech corporations) has given me great pause about my reliance on US-based software services.
I've always been a big fan of open source software, and as a nerdy developer type, the idea of self-hosting as much as I possibly can is appealing. Ideally this should be a task anyone could undertake - but the reality is doing so is very technical, and requires adequate time to maintain, troubleshoot and of course pay for the hosting - so its not accessible to everyone. Its also a pretty hard task to completely remove one's self from US companies, when one has built much of one's family's digital life locked into the Apple ecosystem, especially when the next best alternative (Android, which I have developed apps for but do not appreciate much of) is mostly controlled by just another big US corporation. Of course there are some options there too (though these may be on limited practical lifespans), but I'm all about baby steps, especially given my otherwise busy family life raising two children with my wife.
So a decade after migrating to a static blog, I have again migrated this blog, this time back to a dynamic CMS; the open source Ghost; which I am of course self-hosting. The primary consideration here, is Ghost's upcoming ActivityPub implementation. The ability for somebody to 'follow' this blog on the Fediverse, reply to posts and engage in conversations which are reflected back here, in a decentralised manner, from a user's platform of choice (Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy or anything else); is hopefully the future of the internet, instead of closed source commercial silos.
To move towards digital sovereignty and independence (as I like to think of it) I identified a short list of services that I could start the process of migrating away from sooner than later:
- Slack: Serving realtime group online chats. Slack was once great software but had started to enshittify long before it was acquired by Salesforce.
- Github: To host my personal coding projects, such as my animated GIF web app that's running at bed.wtf. Github (owned by Microsoft) has long been the go-to for most open source software and is thus a dependency for most software running around the world these days. What could possibly go wrong with such a critical choke point?
- Facebook Groups for organising events and sharing photos. Because Facebook has always been terrible and I should have deleted my account years ago. Better later than never!
- Apple Photos: Collecting my own personal & family photos, and to share albums securely with relatives.
- FastMail Contacts and Calendars: Whilst FastMail is an Australian owned company, they host most of their data centres in the US now.
- 1Password: long my password manager that syncs across my devices, with a shared vault with my wife.
- FastMail Email: This will be a tricky one, as self hosting an email server is insanely hard to do these days, as the major players use the excuse of combatting spam to effectively gate-keep email services.
In seeking solutions for the above, I am not at all against utilising open sourced projects authored by US citizens or even US companies. I have nothing against most citizens of the US (or the world anywhere - people are people and mostly just want to get on with their lives). The nature of open source means that even with a US team hosting their code on Github, I can have a local copy of this, and if necessary, fork and apply my own patches. This would not be a long term solution of course, but it's a grand deal better than relying on a US hosted service with data hosted in the US (especially a 'free' one). The controlling access to, and the potential misuse of my data is the number one concern here.
In my next posts I'll write about what I've done so far to replace the above services, how I've done so, and my experiences so far. Another nice thing about utilising Ghost is that along side the standard RSS feed, you could just sign up and get emails when I do a post, so if you'd like to follow along, you can sign up here!
Top Photo by Alina Grubnyak / Unsplash