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by grumpy-cowboy 2414 days ago
Tired of all this ads. I understand that some level of Ads is required (nothing's free!). But this becoming ridiculous (and I'm not talking about personal data mining). Instead of just whining about that, I decided to move away from this:

- My email/calendar/contacts on paid Fastmail.com account using my own domain. I don't want to deal with all the work required to maintain an email server: spam filtering, prevent being falsely flagged as a spam server, .... And I use an alias per account I have. For example: amazon@mydomain.com, hn@mydomain.com, ... So if my email got spammed/stolen, first I'll advise the site and I'll just create a new one (ex: amazon2@mydomain.com).

- Host my own federated servers like Matrix, Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfeed, ...

- Host my own Git "social server" with public and private repos.

- ...

I think we have to come back to what the Web/Internet was before: a federation of servers working together (ex: Usenet). When I talk about that to people, they don't understand. I then use a simple example of this: email servers. You can have an email account on any servers on the internet and send a message to anyone who have an email account on another server. You CAN'T do that with FB/Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, ...

Big corps shoot themselves in the foot. People have limits and they are not that stupid. When you taste a new (old) way to exchange with other people without being flooded with Ads (Mastodon, Matrix, ... or simply emails), you can't come back.

edit: formatting

4 comments

Some people do have limits, but the crowd, on the opposite, is lazy and hypnotized. From their perspective, you're the one missing out all the fun and ease of digital life/world. It's you (a black sheep) who can't be reached via the most obvious communication channels (FB, WhatsApp, Viber, etc).
There's a saying that lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math. Sounds like your thesis is that ads are a tax on people who don't know how to set up a server, and I agree.
I was about to set up my own domain with a paid email account too. My reason was privacy. But then I was wondering even if I have my own encrypted email service, does it defeat the purpose if the sender is using Gmail? Since Google would still scan that email and figure out things about me. Any advice? Thanks.
Hah! And I thought "email is dead".

Sorry couldn't resist.