I haven't updated this site in a while. I've lost interest in this privacy and software freedom journey and don't have it in me anymore to write much.
We thought the internet was bad five years ago but compared to what it has become, I wish we could go back. Since 2021, we've seen the rise of AI, mandatory digital IDs for the sake of "protecting" children, and a hardware crisis that could bring about the end of personal hardware. At least back then the internet consisted of human-made content and there were workarounds and tools to protect your privacy which over time have disappeared or have been made obsolete. It's no longer possible to browse any site on a minimalist browser or without JavaScript since 2025 when sites started using Anubis and other captchas. Yes the internet really was a much better place even five years ago when COVID-19 was still fucking around.
So where are we headed? In a nightmare but realistic scenario, probably a mandatory real-name system and ID verification for the internet, no more open source operating systems, everyone renting their hardware in the cloud, agentic AI bullshit being forced onto us. How long can we keep using workarounds? The only viable solution at this point is to get the fuck off the internet. The free, open, and private internet we once had is gone and never coming back. We can blame the combination of advancing technology and AI, greed, toxicity, and carelessness.
I had only been using XMPP for Digdeeper's MUC. XMPP is bad for privacy in general because it leaks a ton of metadata by default including your time zome (some clients let you disable this), and every XMPP client is shit. I've gone through many clients and there isn't a single one that's actively developed, fully supports OMEMO, doesn't leak your time zone or system information (or lets you disable leaks), and has a reasonably sane GUI (I fucking hate the new Discord-ized GUIs most messaging clients use now). Gajim used to be pretty good and still is from a security standpoint, but I hate it's new UI since 1.4 or even before that.
I'm not sure what to use instead, but I think instant messengers in general are a problem for privacy and anonymity. Asynchronous communication, specifically posting on forums, might be the way to go, although that still depends on the forum software used.
I only use frontends for sites that block Tor/VPNs, require an account, or do not load without JavaScript, and only if I really need to or came across said sites as many times search results (specifically Google and Bing) will be dominated by Reddit and a few other platforms. Keep in mind using these requires trusting both the platform and the instance maintainers but I'd rather watch YouTube videos without viewing ads or enabling JS.
You don't really need an extension for this. I just bookmark a couple of instances then create custom filters in uBlock Origin to block the malicious sites so I don't accidentally open them. Then I'll manually edit the URL to redirect to the frontend. I'd suggest switching between several instances to distribute bandwidth between them. Sometimes for longer videos I might download them using yt-dlp instead.
We're all aware of the massive RAM and SSD shortage that's caused prices on PCs and hardware to increase drastically because the tech giants keep hoarding all the RAM for their AI datacenters. And now PCs, consoles, and other systems have become or will become unaffordable for everyone. From the looks of things this won't end anytime soon, and that's purely optimistic. Is this really just about AI datacenters or is that an excuse for tech giants to purposely make hardware unaffordable so everyone will be forced to rent their cloud PCs for a monthly subscription? This could be the end of desktops.
All of this could have been prevented if AI never happened in the first place. I will not use or support your AI and/or Cloud bullshit and you shouldn't either.