2024 Recap: Getting in Gear
Looking back on the last year and planning for the future
Welcome friends of the Libre Solutions Network,
I hope you’ve all had an excellent Christmas & holiday season. Hopefully you are all filled with joy, cheer, and optimism for the year ahead. I can imagine how for many 2024 was quite a bittersweet year. There have been some big victories, but also many troubling trends going unabated. No matter how you’re feeling about 2025, it’s clear that there’s a great deal of caution and discernment needed. There are marvelous opportunities ahead with some re-prioritization and focus. Let us take the time to consider our role in what lies ahead, and how we can work towards a better future. As always, I’m thrilled to be here at your service to help however I can. I wish you and your loved ones a fantastic 2025!
Looking Forward: Plans for 2025
2025 is my chance to continue this long-term. I already feel like I’m all out of time, but my drive pushes me to continue for as long as I can. Originally, my only goal for this project was to raise my level of productivity. This was because I was in a terribly dark place after being ejected from the workforce. The great news is that this multimedia project has absolutely accomplished this. When I compare what I was able to accomplish at the start of this to what I can do now, I am incredibly grateful.
I appreciate all the “fellow travelers” who have stumbled on this project. Even if somebody has only seen one of my works I hope they got something useful out of it. I have received a great deal of encouragement, feedback, and even criticism that has helped me a lot in this journey. I am convinced this project was the right thing to preserve my sanity, and recover my abilities during an incredibly difficult time. I am very skeptical I would be functional at all if not for the kindness people have shown me. For that, I am incredibly thankful for everyone who has interacted with this project in any way.
As a consequence of becoming more functional and time passing is that my priorities have shifted. I must ensure that I am spending the majority of my effort returning to a healthy weight. Loosing all the weight I need to, despite already losing a significant fraction, is shaping up to be the most challenging endeavor I have ever taken on. I am immensely thankful that I am even in the position to attempt it. It places significant demands on me that makes it much harder to persist, much less tackle other objectives. I am consistently documenting this process because I never want to forget how challenging it really was. I’ve been inspired by others making the journey, so my hope is to pay-it-forward by sharing mine.
As such, I don’t have the capacity to really deliver on this project in all the ways I would like. It’s a difficult situation to be in, so my goal is to maximize my effort to make what little I put into this project have a lasting impact. As such, I’ll be really focused on building the things I think are important rather than sharing more words. I’ll still have lots to say, but I need to really walk the walk and build at least a couple of examples of what I believe needs to be done.
I’ve already mentioned I’ve got an exciting RSS tool in the works, but that’s very much the tip of the iceberg. There is a wide variety of tools I think would really make a massive impact, ranging from fairly simple to immensely complex. I wish I had the bandwidth to work on them all, or even bring in others to help. The discovery I’ve made during this project is that tech freedom is currently far too complex, and us ‘techies’ hate to admit it. I think it’s up to those of us with the capacity to make our digital landscape have to devote the time to it. I don’t anticipate there being a lot of money for that mission, so I want to at least demonstrate what can be accomplished at a small scale.
I do not believe that digital freedom is hopeless. Yes, there are incredibly powerful nefarious forces working diligently to keep people corralled in all kinds of digital prisons. Yes, there are an immense amount of resources pooled into ensuring that cyber rebels are distracted and ineffective. Yes, things look pretty bleak when you really take in the big picture. But I’m committed to pushing forward as long as there are still options on the table. We’ll never be able to fix everything, but a bit of hope and effort can really make a massive difference over the long run.
I believe my purpose in all this is to inspire people to make the choices they need to live in a way that opposes digital totalitarianism. By making the fine distinctions necessary to untangle the messy maze that is the digital landscape we’ve inherited. My hope is to encourage people to make the pragmatic decisions that can work better for us all in the long run. The goal is never to shame people into perfection, but merely to keep the positive momentum going. I know there’s still quite a lot of reason for optimism, but I hope you’ll join me in keeping an eye out for it in 2025.
Best of 2024
These are what I consider the most important items I’ve put forth in 2024.
I’m open to alternative suggestions, but these really are the highlights in my mind, or at least “under-loved” items.
Data Shedding
This video is a summary of a report on how programmatic advertising can be weaponized for mass real-time surveillance. This report is highly troubling but not particularly surprising. If you want to …
Serenum: The 'From Scratch' OS Revolution
I had the honor and pleasure to speak with Sam Smith about the new operating system he’s building: Serenum. We had a conversation about what motivated him to build this system, plans for the future, …
Lessons from Alt-Tech Failures
Data breaches are a serious problem. We do not live in an environment where it is safe for people’s PII (Personally Identifiable Information) to be widely available. When somebody’s data is leaked or…
PeerTube hits 1K views!
You’re welcome to check out the PeerTube channel. My self-hosted home for all multimedia content. While total views have doubled over 2024, I would really like to see more interaction over the Fediverse generally. In light of people complaining about Elon’s heavy-handed management of X, it would be nice to see prominent thought-leaders and audiences move to actually decentralized alternatives.
2024 has been a great year for PeerTube, the Federated video hosting platform we really don’t love enough. Recently adding: automatic transcription of captions for uploaded videos, a new mobile app, and huge 7.0 release with a wide variety of updates. If you’re a small community of people working together to get your own message out, I’d highly recommend investing in your own PeerTube instance to ensure your content is available away from Big Tech (and alt-tech) platforms.
Doubling down on Substack
I asked for help learning how to get more eyes on my digital freedom work. I had many great suggestions about expanding to other platforms. I’m still doing that, but I came across a great suggestion from a friend. I’ve already been documenting my weight loss journey on my personal site why not turn that into a new Substack? So I’ve launched Micro-dosing Failure, which will be a new place for people to get all the updates in addition to my personal site.
Expanding to new frontiers
I’m convinced doubling down on Substack is the least-bad option out of other “growth strategies”.
My accounts on various platforms are:
Fediverse:
Odysee LibreSolutionsNetwork:4
X @CyberAutonomy
(LibreSolutionsNetwork is shorter than the character limit)Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-7230185
Tiktok: @libresolutionsnetwork
More from 2024
Free Software Developer Interviews
I really appreciate the opportunity to highlight the important work of great developers. Somebody building excellent tools in their spare time doesn’t have the time for a marketing budget or social media shills. I think it’s crucial that this project spends the time to raise awareness about these excellent projects.
Teachable Moments
I really like this format and it seems many of you do to. “Teachable Moments” is where I take a contentious part of the wider discussion and try to zero-in on on the fine details of a particular pressing topic.
Great Conversations
One of the most rewarding parts of doing this is being able to share deep dives into important topics with people I find fascinating. It has been a pleasure and a great honor to connect with so many great minds.
Cyber Fix
Cyber Fix is on hiatus, but you can listen through the entire episodes on the PeerTube archive. It’s something I’d love to continue doing with more support. For the moment I can’t quite commit to the demands of that project.
What a fine tradition, looking backwards and forwards Gabe. I'll be doing one on 2025 as a year of collaboration and I have a strong feeling that will include you. I don't know exactly how, but our paths are intertwining for a reason. And I take your advice on diversifying to other platforms to heart. That feels like a new step I can maybe take in-stride without being too much of a leap.
Thanks for sharing all your good thinking and research this year, and I'm excited for your microdosing failure journey. It seems indistinguishable from microdosing success.
Wishing you all the very best in the New Year, Gabe!! ❤️