I haven't slept today. Not because of some philosophical issue that kept me up or a submission I forgot to write, I'm just working the night shift and forgot to nap earlier.

The night shift has its benefits - no one from R&D is awake to push something to prod that takes down half the infrastructure - but it's also a lot of really, really dull hours of staring at a bright monitor and listening to a noisy computer fan choke itself to death in the corner. It's what brought me to open up this blog in the first place and start getting some words out of my head and into the gaping void that is the internet. Question is - what about, exactly? I have a lot of topics I'm interested in, but I'm not really an expert or even a particularly unique voice in the majority of them, so it would be kind of pointless to write out, even if only to myself.

At some point while thinking, I realized what I was even doing. Despite having used pretty much every major social media site in the past few years (and having abandoned them in the past year or so, following insane CEO decisions from every direction), for some reason this minimalist, no-feature site I just found while reading on hacker news attracted me the most so far. So much that I've opened a blog and started typing out stuff within minutes of discovering it. Not only that, I've been letting go of a lot of apps and sites I previously deemed indispensable in favor of lightweight alternatives; moved from Outlook to Thunderbird, trying out Ubuntu in favor of Win10.

Why am I doing that?

I'm not exactly a technophobe, so I've been aware of all of these existing for many years now, but I never really felt the appeal to hop on a ship with only 3 other people on it. The opposite was true, if anything; I remember in some fandom I was in we had a group of people who insisted everyone else only chat in IRC, despite no one but a handful of people there even having a client and the majority of people having already made discord servers for the hobby, and I ended up being one of the bigger voices to move off IRC and possibly just ditch the servers there entirely. Move to a more centralized system that more people were familiar with. The people on IRC fought tooth and nail to not even allow anything besides IRC and talked about other networks as if merely looking in their general direction would infect your computer with a virtual STD.

That's how a lot of the "anti-centralized" crowd seemed to me for a solid few years. Not necessarily stupid, but extremely stubborn and out of touch. They had the way their stuff worked, and they weren't particularly keen to move a finger in anyone else's direction, so everyone else would have to accommodate. To even communicate with them you'd need to set up a bot bridge from the system everyone else was using to Their Space. A gilded cage they set up for themselves. Felt like a bunch of shit to me. And yet as I type this I see me acting in much the same way. Maybe not forcing everyone to accommodate me quite yet, but screaming at everyone I know to stop using chrome and office365.

Maybe it's the change in perspective. I've noticed a lot of big, promising networks start gutting themselves in favor of... frankly I'm not quite sure. "Shareholders" would be the obvious answer, but a lot of the time the decisions they make aren't just annoying to the high end user, they tank the company's value. Twitter's Meltdown into X, Reddit gutting APIs, Discord adding more and more fluff to the app, Chrome's "privacy protecting" ad suite, Tumblr's everything, Steam's... actually, Steam's doing great so far, kudos to valve. Maybe it's heightened in the last few years - I know some tech illiterate folk I know also started seeing it - but maybe I just didn't see it until now, and this seed's been festering the entire time. The fundamental proof that, while convenient, centralization in putting way too much faith in a company that at its core exists to create profit. It's constructing a house on top of a shaky ground that could give way at any moment, but seems fine so far.

A lot of these new conveniences are nice, but they're rarely built to last. I'm sure Discord is gonna go the way of the dodo in a handful of years too. So I've started to make the switch - using more programs that are open source, putting ad and tracker blockers on anything I can, refusing to install games that require kernel access for their anti-cheats. I'm downloading more and more programs that arrive light as a feather and that I then weigh down with 200 extensions and a cool animated theme that would give normal people migraines. Some people call it "taking back control of your computer/internet", but honestly that feels way too pretentious to me. I'm not participating in a tech revolution, I just stopped using shitty products.

That IRC VS Everyone war I mentioned earlier is probably something many people in the tech world have experienced and have laughed at all over, but honestly? At this rate I can see myself starting up my own network sooner rather than later.

Assuming the planet doesn't burn down by then.