4.22.26 - We Should All Use Less Proprietary Tech
Almost everything we use is a subscription, a license, or tied up with something that is.
Your word docs? Microsoft Word. I don’t think it’s so bad to just use a software you buy that you permanently own. That’s not different than buying a piece of hardware. But now a days MS Office is subscription based. Your files are only accessible and editable as long as you pay up? That’s horrible!
Your notes app? It’s some weird file format that’s baked into the Apple Notes app. You can export them to PDFS or copy paste them but otherwise they’re not really files you can port around. That’s not good.
Use plain text files, Markdown language, and maybe a nice lightweight and inexpensive “skin” software like Typora instead. This will handle 99% of your word processing needs.
Need to do a document with complex formatting? Use LibreOffice.
Photoshop? I’ll give them a pass because it’s so good. But for most things, we can use GIMP.
The photos app? I think we should start keeping photos as plain old local files more. If you have a lot of photos, put them on a bigger hard drive and host them on your own server so you can access them remotely. This will be a project of mine this summer. I don’t like that a lot of my photos live exclusively on iCloud.
Cloud storage in general? Let’s get off that shit. Self-host your own “cloud.” Many pirates already do this with their illegal movie libraries. We should all do this for our stuff more generally.
Wordpress, Square? Absolutely fucking not. Use html language. Vibe code it.
AI assistant? This one is a little higher entry barrier. Buy GPUs, run a model on a local hard drive. A lot of the technology is open source. Have your other devices access it remotely. I know there’s a way to do this but haven’t figured it out yet. I know some run DeepSeek locally.
Operating system? Use Linux. I’m going to make this hard pivot in the very near future. On principle.
Email? This gets complicated. You can have your own email server. For instance, I could easily have an email Phil@knxnts.xyz
But that “.xyz” part, what is that? That’s a top-level domain I don’t own (read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains).
It’s like “.com” which is owned by VeriSign.
I don’t want to get into the structure, but basically, you’ll have to pay someone money to get a domain with these extensions at some point. They’re “owned” by someone else.
How do you even get one of these?
Well that traced back to ICANN, a global nonprofit organization. If I wanted to have a site called, say, knxnts.knxnts,
I would need to get “.knxnts” registered with them. Then it would show up on a list like this: https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/gtld/
Can anyone do that? Absolutely not. That wouldn’t work. They do it on a steady limited basis, and there are hefty registration fees. http://archive.icann.org/en/dnso/new-gtlds-01apr00.htm
The applications cost 227,000 at base. https://centralnicregistry.com/icann-new-gtld-program/
This is my white whale. My own top-level domain. My own website. My own email. My own AI assistant run on my own server. Everything I use is either open source, my own, or has a lifelong license. Total digital sovereignty.
“You might say, I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one” https://familyguy.fandom.com/wiki/Petoria
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