Owning your data

Owning your own data is hard. I've been trying to own as much as I can, and my site has become a reflection of that process, both in what I display and discuss. As difficult as it is, there's a freedom in owning as much as you can.

When Twitter was sold, I joined the migration to Mastodon. I have my own instance where all of my posts sit. I pay for this to be hosted, but Mastodon makes migrations easy and data portable. (I haven't been on any of Meta's platforms in over a decade, have never used TikTok, long ago jettisoned LinkedIn and reference both YouTube and reddit on an as needed basis when searching for something.)

When last.fm (under the ownership of Paramount) was on the precipice of being sold, I exported my listens to ListenBrainz. I used the structured export from ListenBrainz to bootstrap the music portion of this application. I've gone to absurd lengths to control my music data and how I listen to music.

Rather than use trakt, I import data on shows I'm actively watching and track my own activity. I import and track movie data alongside TV data.

I've left Apple Books in favor of an audiobookshelf instance where I listen to audiobooks, podcasts and articles I've saved. I built a PWA leveraging audiobookshelf through which I read all the ePubs I've stored. Reading progress is sent to my site and reflected on my reading page. I maintain a reading streak alongside this progress.

I only use GitHub for work and have moved all of my projects to a self-hosted Forgejo instance.

I self-host and follow news in FreshRSS and save links in linkding.

Analytics on this site are minimal and sit on a self-hosted Goatcounter instance.

I host my contacts in Baïkal and store my photos in Immich.

This site sits on a boring VPS and deploys are managed in Coolify.

Everything I write or take note of is stored in Markdown files and edited using Obsidian.

I don't own everything. I'm not brave enough to host my own email or password manager. I'm using Apple hardware because my family lives in that ecosystem. I'm blocking their analytics as best I can, but that is what it is.

There is a significant measure of freedom in owning all of this and there's also some maintenance overhead. Things do go down, updates can go awry or DNS can be DNS. But, for all of that complexity, I'm able to engage with news, media and the internet on as close to my own terms as I can get.

I can dump data from an app, I can connect the apps I own however I see fit (APIs permitting) and eschew platform constraints. What I listen to, watch and read is tracked only by me and exposed as much or as little as I might like.

However, while I can connect the applications I use, I'm closed off to the centralized services that I refuse to use. I haven't missed them. I've found joy in missing out. In reducing noise, avoiding dark patterns and hostile affordances. I'm better able to focus on what's in front of me and communicate purposefully over chat and email.

It's worth noting that this was a time consuming process and a rather technical one. It isn't convenient until you build conveniences for yourself. What I would love to see is more movement towards decentralization, more open protocols and more users abandoning centralized platforms as their stance towards their users becomes increasingly adversarial. The tools are here and we should keep building with non-technical users in mind.