#optoutproject — Public Fediverse posts

Dag 1 Digital gallring: Ordna förutsättningarna och ta några förberedande steg

https://www.godaliv.se/digital-sjalvstandighet/dag-1-digital-gallring-ordna-forutsattningarna-och-ta-nagra-forberedande-steg/

Considering the subject of #Threema getting sold by one private equity firm to another, with former KKR and Morgan Stanley staff at its helm, I‘m reminded of the poignancy of a point @cyberlyra made in the #OptOutProject.

Avoiding the lock-in effect of tech companies, stay mobile and ready to move on any time.

We’ve witnessed enshitification too often to maintain the illusion a good thing will remain good.

With #diday her project is more relevant then ever.

https://www.optoutproject.net/

The Opt Out Project
".. live without Big Tech"
https://www.optoutproject.net/

#SolarPunkSunday #OptOutProject

@julian That's a great post, thanks for sharing!

"just FOMO and inertia" really hits the nail on the head for me.

Also awesome to see that #OptOutProject helped you, as @janet is one of our founders!

Well, getting up at 4AM to start the day’s journey and returning home at 11:45PM wasn’t exactly… relaxing… but there is no doubt in my mind that it was worth every single minute to meetup with and get to learn from the folks at #fedicon

Crashing in my own bed feels very very good. Goodnight fedizens, may your dreams be filled with #mosstodon and #bloomscrolling while also righting all that is wrong with the social media world!
#dreamers #doers #makeithappen #community #takebacktheSocialWeb #optoutproject

Well, getting up at 4AM to start the day’s journey and returning home at 11:45PM wasn’t exactly… relaxing… but there is no doubt in my mind that it was worth every single minute to meetup with and get to learn from the folks at #fedicon

Crashing in my own bed feels very very good. Goodnight fedizens, may your dreams be filled with #mosstodon and #bloomscrolling while also righting all that is wrong with the social media world!
#dreamers #doers #makeithappen #community #takebacktheSocialWeb #optoutproject

Well, getting up at 4AM to start the day’s journey and returning home at 11:45PM wasn’t exactly… relaxing… but there is no doubt in my mind that it was worth every single minute to meetup with and get to learn from the folks at #fedicon

Crashing in my own bed feels very very good. Goodnight fedizens, may your dreams be filled with #mosstodon and #bloomscrolling while also righting all that is wrong with the social media world!
#dreamers #doers #makeithappen #community #takebacktheSocialWeb #optoutproject

Well, getting up at 4AM to start the day’s journey and returning home at 11:45PM wasn’t exactly… relaxing… but there is no doubt in my mind that it was worth every single minute to meetup with and get to learn from the folks at #fedicon

Crashing in my own bed feels very very good. Goodnight fedizens, may your dreams be filled with #mosstodon and #bloomscrolling while also righting all that is wrong with the social media world!
#dreamers #doers #makeithappen #community #takebacktheSocialWeb #optoutproject

Well, getting up at 4AM to start the day’s journey and returning home at 11:45PM wasn’t exactly… relaxing… but there is no doubt in my mind that it was worth every single minute to meetup with and get to learn from the folks at #fedicon

Crashing in my own bed feels very very good. Goodnight fedizens, may your dreams be filled with #mosstodon and #bloomscrolling while also righting all that is wrong with the social media world!
#dreamers #doers #makeithappen #community #takebacktheSocialWeb #optoutproject

Hold on, we have a NASA alum Janet from @TheBulletin here and she is talking about how the "good guys" (eg Apple) became what they said they would never be!

How do we help people to opt out?

#fedicon #apple #socialmedia #optoutproject #opensocialweb #techreclaimers

I've been working on moving my digital life away from exploitative companies and toward more positive options. I'm following The Opt Out Project, https://www.optoutproject.net/the-cyber-cleanse-take-back-your-digital-footprint/ . Today I posted about my reasons for taking on this project, https://davidbruffner.com/2025/07/26/starting-my-opt-out-project/. Essentially, I want to avoid ads, tracking, AI slop, proprietary code, and platforms that overpower their users. I want to go towards services that value consent, privacy, that encourage learning how things work, and that are built by and for the community.

#optOutProject
#FOSS
#privacy

Starting my Opt-Out Project

The internet and computers are great. I love them and I want to share this digital world with my two kids. But it’s not all wonderful. Here are things I am trying to avoid with technology:

• Ads
• Tracking of my activity online
• Click-bait
• AI slop
• App stores that 30% cuts or more of profits
• Walled-gardens (for example Apple)
• Not being able to own anything (digital rights management software allows Amazon to revoke access to books that were bought on the Kindle)
• Apps that are designed to be addictive
• Opaque recommender algorithms
• Proprietary code and black box apps that make it difficult to learn how it works
• Powerful platforms where regular people have little say
• Banning and shadow-banning when people have different political views than ownership of platform
• Secret business models (usually meaning start free and then enshittify later)

Things that I want more of with technology:

• Consent
• Privacy
• Ownership of my data
• Software where you are encouraged to learn how it works
• Freedom to mess around with software and media and to share it with others
• Software organizations built by and for the community
• Open, sustainable business models
• Community
• Decentralization (no monopolies that can over power a market)

In 2025, these aspirations can seem like a pipe dream. But I’m optimistic that there is another way. At the very least, I can move in the direction of this dream even if I can not fully achieve it. My plan is to follow The Opt-Out Project’s guide which has a 21 day plan (LOL, it will take me much longer) to switch my whole digital life toward services that respect this dream.

This will not be easy. The guide shows how to completely get rid of Gmail, Google docs, and even Google Maps which are all services that I rely on heavily. It won’t just affect me too. It recommends switching away from Big Tech messaging apps like Whatsapp and from proprietary social networks such as LinkedIn as well. I will need to navigate how to distance myself from these exploitative services while hopefully finding ways to stay connected to my friends and family that still use them.

But I’m excited about this effort. I’ve already switched to an open source social network, Mastodon, which is part of a wider social network called the Fediverse. I love it! I find really interesting people, and I am encouraged by them. It’s nice to have more control over who shows up in my feeds, and feels more like how you meet people in real life. It’s more work, but has a chance for deeper connections. I’m expecting that as I transition more of my other services away from big, profit-seeking companies that I will learn a lot. I hope I will experience more freedom and connect with a positive community.

I plan on sharing my journey about it. So far I have finished Day 1 and Day 2. For Day 1, I bought an external hard-drive to save all the data that will potentially be on all my accounts on these Big Tech services. I got a 4 TB WD My Passport. Day 2 was more involved and was about moving away from Big Tech browsers and search engines to more open source and privacy protecting options. I already used Firefox, a popular open source browser, and DuckDuckGo, a privacy conscious search engine. But I wanted to diversify options since browsers and search engines are critical to accessing the internet. So here are the things I explored :

• Firefox privacy improvements
  • I made security preferences more strict on Firefox following these instructions.
  • I installed Google Container for Firefox
• Installed and tested additional search engines
  • StartPage, a private meta-search engine that uses Google results but protect your information from Google tracking
  • Quant, is a French search engine with its own search index
• I installed and tested out a couple other browsers
  • The super private Tor browser following this guide (I installed it by downloading the Tor browser installation files as a tar file)
  • Vivaldi is an open source browser built on top of Chromium which is the foundation of the popular Chrome browser

They have been working fine so far. I’ve been using Quant as my main search engine on my desktop computer with no issues. I’ve used Vivaldi some and Tor occasionally and they both are fine too. I just switched my default search engine on mobile to Startpage so I will begin testing that out more too.

That’s it for now. I hope to work on Day 3 soon where I will take stock of all my digital accounts. Sounds like it will be a lot!

#foss #learning #openSource #OptOutProject #privacy

I rage quit Google recently and this is my first toot from LineageOS.

I used Linux on my computer when I was 14 to 21 but eventually came back to big tech as I slowly turned into a reasonably adjusted grown-up. We'll see how long this lasts.

Being a paying customer always feel a better than being the product, so I may get an iPhone once my Fairphone wears out.

#lineageos #android #optoutproject