I haven't been writing blogs in English for a while, a long long long while. If you switched the language of this website from English to Simplified Chinese, you would find out I wrote way more articles there, including a monthly series. I initially started to write blogs for practicing writing and thinking skills, and it went very well. I met more blogger friends, and was able to talk about my online experiences in my real life; it's like double winning.

Lately, one topic we have been discussing a lot is data sovereignty. Free and comfortable services from massive corporations are not always gifts from angels. The monopoly of today's internet is not just in the cloud or browsers; it invades our local workspaces and digital identities as well.

Google and Microsoftare prime examples. They love ads. I mean, Google started as an advertising company and remains one at its core. Microsoft, on the other hand, is the one of the few lucky ones who currently making massive profits from AI, heavily driven by ads. The situation goes beyond the browser. Windows 11 has become the worst operating system in my tier ranking. It's bloated with ads and telemetry. With Copilot, ew I hate this name now, being forced into every corner of the operating system, it feels less like a helpful assistant and more like a surveillance camera constantly monitoring my local workspace.

People often underestimate how powerful this advertising and tracking model is. Corporations earn trillions of dollars by showing ads on their customers' devices. We think we are getting free services, but we are actually guinea pigs in a wheel, running and running to generate profits for them.

To understand how I decided to fight back against this, let we wind back a little. Everything started when I began using Mastodon.

Mastodon is a Twitter-like software from the Fediverse. If you are unfamiliar, you can think of the Fediverse as the United States of America: a collection of federated states. New York can have different state laws than California, but they all follow federal laws. New Yorkers can also travel to California without police checking their passports. Substituted into software concepts: different servers (or instances) have their own rules, but they all communicate using the same federal law -- the ActivityPub protocol.

The problem the Fediverse tries to solve is centralization. On modern social platforms, you must register separate accounts for Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit, and your data is locked within their walls. When Elon Musk took over Twitter (now, unfortunately, X), it highlighted the fatal flaw of centralized platforms: the company holds all your data, can arbitrarily ban you, manipulate the algorithm to make you watch more ads, or completely change the platform's nature. You are just renting space in their realm. Mastodon, by contrast, has no algorithms. You follow who you want, read your chronological feed, and if your instance administrator goes rogue, you can pack up your data and migrate to another instance.

Using Fediverse software opened my eyes, but it was only the first step. By listening to Cory Doctorow's speech The Post-American Internet and learning about his concept of Enshittification, I realized the inevitable fate of centralized platforms: they lure you in with free services, lock you in, and then degrade the experience to extract maximum value. Furthermore, Richard Stallman and the GNU project taught me that user freedom is entirely dependent on software freedom.

This philosophical shift triggered my massive migration. To reclaim my local control, I abandoned Windows entirely and switched to Arch Linux (EndeavourOS). I started replacing proprietary software with free and open-source (FOSS) alternatives. I learned to use GNU Emacs; instead of Gmail and Outlook, I use Fairmail and self-hosted emails; instead of YouTube Music, I use Tempo and Feishin with local files and radios; instead of YouTube and Bilibili, I use LibreTube and PiliPlus clients with zero data tracking; instead of Google Maps, I use Organic Maps; instead of Google Calendar, I use Etar -- surprisingly, they all went very well!

The most significant change in my daily routine, however, was subscribing to Kagi Search. Kagi fights back against Google's search monopoly. It aggregates results but heavily filters out AI slop, ad-heavy sites, and data-tracking JavaScript.

The common counter-argument I hear is: Why buy a service when you can get Google for free? I used to think the same way. Unfortunately, data-driven corporations don't see users of free services as customers (and even sadly, users of paid services are sometimes not seen as customers as well); they see them as organisms generating valuable data. You pay with your privacy. Paying a small business like Kagi to treat me like a human being who deserves privacy is not a big deal. It is an investment in a healthier internet.

Eventually, I realized that true data sovereignty requires hosting your own infrastructure. My personal blog used to be hosted on Netlify and protected by Cloudflare -- both centralized platforms. To fix this, I rented a VPS from IONOS. I will be honest: a cheap VPS located in the United States is not the ultimate solution for privacy, as European providers offer much stronger legal data protections (I'm fully aware of this, I even wrote an article about this in Chinese). However, working within a tight budget, this US-based IONOS server was my practical starting point.

On this Linux server, I host my personal websites, a Gemini capsule version of my blog (see gemini://cytrogen.icu using a Gemini client), and services like FreshRSS. The most critical piece of infrastructure I deployed is a self-hosted email service using Stalwart.

Replacing Google with a self-hosted email server gave me ultimate control. To prevent spam and track data leaks, I use an email alias system. For example, I use the alias amazon@mydomain.com strictly for my Amazon account. This alias automatically forwards to my main inbox. If amazon@ ever starts receiving unrelated promotions or junk mail, I will know exactly which company sold or leaked my information.

No, I am not saying Amazon sold my personal information for real. At least I didn't investigate that yet.

It is sometimes sad to see friends looking down on these efforts, mocking me with just use Google. They forget that the internet originally started as a free (in the gratis and libre sense) and open commons. It was not supposed to be a series of walled gardens owned by tech giants. Although the digital world is currently occupied by these monopolies, reclaiming our operating systems, paying for ethical search engines, and hosting our own data is how we fight the momentum back. DeGoogling and DeMicrosoft is not just a technical experiment for me; it is a new start!