Tag: foss

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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
  • 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!

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It’s been a little over a year since my last post. Since you’re reading my personal blog you might be interested to know what I have been diving into in the meantime. Here’s a short list:

  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning. I really think that AI systems need to be free to learn in order to become really useful. I was excited by Jeff Clune’s work on open-ended learning. I heard about his work through the TWIML podcast. Jeff Clune worked on this amazing project called POET where the AI system created obstacle courses and used them to train its parkour skills. I also got into Neural Operators which are a class of neural networks that map between functions instead of between vectors like normal neural nets. The sound like they are great for physics simulations.
  • Personal knowledge graphs. I switched from Evernote to Obsidian and Joplin. I adapted my task management workflow using this post, by Ruben Berenguel, as inspiration. There was a lot of fiddling and learning involved, but I like how all my notes are in markdown text files now. I feel more free.
  • Joined Mastodon social network. I’ve been really enjoying it. If you haven’t heard of it, it is a decentralized social network kind of like Twitter. It is part of the Fediverse which is a collection of different decentralized social networks that all interoperate together. Here’s my Mastodon profile, https://raphus.social/@davidruffner. Come check out the Fediverse!
  • Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). I did a deep dive into it. I learned a lot from the Libre Lounge podcast, hosted by Serge Wroclawski, and the FOSS and Crafts podcast, hosted by Morgan Lemmer-Webber and Christine Lemmer-Webber. I’ve been slowly transitioning my apps to open source alternatives.
  • I’ve been dabbling in the Elixir and Scheme programming languages. I took the Hands-On Guile Scheme for Beginners class and enjoyed it. I’m still looking to get better at the Actor Model, but have definitely gotten some exposure to functional programming.
  • I did a dive into Category Theory. I think someone shared about it on Mastodon, and I was blown away by this series of lectures by Bartosz Milewski.
  • I’m did a deep dive into Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication. It has helped me to grapple with what is going on between Israel and Gaza, and closer to home as helped with interpersonal conflicts. I’m taking the Bigbie Method intro course and enjoying it so far.
  • FOSS video games. I’ve been having a lot of fun finding free and open source video games to play myself and to share with my two sons (5 and 2). Here are some of the top games so far:
    • SuperTuxKart. We all love it! I got some xBox360 controllers so we can play on the computer as if it is a gaming console. It’s fun finding fan-made tracks and cars too.
    • Sonic Robo Blast 2 a fun retro 3D Sonic game.
    • 0 A.D. An excellent real time strategy game like Age of Empires