I usually don’t get too political on these pages, but at the moment I see a worrying trend of data platforms working against the interests of their clients and consumers, and I feel this is a topic that most people working with the internet in some way should at least think about. I’ve written about the liberation of data from closed platforms before, and have been detaching myself from those platforms over the past two years or so, and to me it looks like that was the right decision.
But let’s talk first about some of the events I mean so that everyone is on the same level. You have probably heard the term “Enshittification“, coined by Canadian writer and digital activist Cory Doctorow to describe the stages platforms pass through until they serve neither their consumers nor their clients anymore. If you are not familiar with that concept, you should really read the article.
Those last stages of Enshittification have increasingly been popping up in news about internet platforms: from Twitter’s rebranding to X and move to far-right conspiracy theories and Meta’s (and therefore Facebook’s, Instagram’s and WhatsApp’s) constant disregard of their users’ privacy, to more recent cases like music platform Bandcamp being bought by a licensing company, blogging platform Substack reinforcing their inclusion of neo-Nazi content, financing platform Patreon raising their fees, technical Q&A platform Stack Overflow selling their content to OpenAI, or group chat platform Discord and link aggregator platform Reddit turning into public companies.
While these examples might be wildly different in background, scope and impact, they are all cases of companies working against the interests of their users after establishing themselves as indispensable. Add to that the blatant stealing of content to feed AI training by almost all privately-owned platforms, and it should be clear that the current situation is not in favour of content creators.
What this means, mainly, is that it will be necessary to move away from those platforms in order to regain sovereignty over your data. Not only is it becoming ever more unclear what happens to your content in the hands of profit-oriented companies, there is also no guarantee that any of the companies that currently host it will be interested in continuing doing so as they seek more ways of creating revenue.
It seems to me that there are several steps involved in protecting data to preserve it in the long term:
- Remove it from closed platforms
- Self-host as much as possible
- Find a sustainable way to preserve the data
- Decentralise as much as possible
To elaborate: removing your data out of the grasp of private companies should be self-evident; self-hosting is a reliable way of making sure nobody except you has any claim to your content – though doing that requires some level of technical knowledge, so it might not be possible for everyone to go all the way; a future-proof way to preserve the data might not really exist (at least for the future in tens or hundreds of years), but at last reasonably sustainable services such as the Internet Archive exist – and they will preserve the data for you if anybody just asks them to; and, lastly, the only way to make sure your content will survive in the long run (outlasting you) is to decentralise it, which means making it available over multiple channels and on multiple storage solutions.
The open-source Fediverse (as opposed to privately-owned Fediverse contributors like Threads) can help with two of the four points listed above, namely decentralising, which is its main selling point, and self-hosting your own instance. But hosting a website or setting up a file server doesn’t have to involve federated solutions, and is the most important first step to make sure your data is safe. Removing it from other platforms should then be an afterthought once you’ve made up your mind.
The main point that remains unsolved is sustainably preserving your data for the future. The Internet Archive is a great place for that purpose at the moment, but they are under constant threat by the current shift of governments and public organisations to the far-right and their desire to remove or outright destroy content outside of their definition of acceptable. As a consequence, there are current movements away from the internet and back to local data storage or even away from digital content back to printed material. At least as an additional backup measure this seems like a reasonable idea. Images of crumbling libraries in dystopian scenarios of the far future come to mind.
It’s ultimately everyone’s individual responsibility to make sure their content is treated respectfully and will be preserved. But I believe the problems listed above should be taken as a warning sign that now is the time to start thinking in the short term.
In my specific case, so far I have closed all my accounts on billionaire-owned Social Media and opened one on Mastodon as a way of connecting with people; closed my Medium account and moved all my articles to the present pages; opened a PeerTube account as my main video channel instead of YouTube; closed my author page on the Amazon-owned Goodreads; deleted my Reddit account; moved all my personal data from Google to a self-hosted Nextcloud instance; and opened an account on Codeberg (instead of the Microsoft-owned GitHub) for my programming stuff.
There is still a lot to do: fully deleting my Google account, including YouTube; finding an alternative to Discord as a subscription-level group chat client; moving away from Soundcloud; and probably some more steps I’m missing right now.
(Update, 7 August: deleted SoundCloud, two to go.)
I do hope that some of the readers of this article will follow my example, just as I have followed other people’s, in order to take back ownership of your data.
The featured image was taken from a photo by Masaaki Komori.