Great post! It's a big part of the reason why I'm focused on helping people be at least aware of Free and Open Source alternatives that they can use to at least be their own digital czar if nothing else. It's certainly much easier to make ourselves more resilient and adaptable than pleading with large corporations to bend to our will rather than...their stakeholders.
I'm definitely closer to the 100-110 range like you 😉
I have a question, but I'll post it as a comment on your piece.
I already do a lot of this. Everything I write on Substack is written first on my laptop and viewed using Hugo (a static web site generator), then uploaded to my personal web site (on a VPS I control), then finally migrated to Substack. Because I'm a bit paranoid, I also back up this laptop to an external hard disk in my home, and another one off-site.
Because I follow almost a hundred Substacks and other info sources, I use an RSS reader instead of dealing with hundreds of email notifications. It keeps the info firehose in one place.
And good keyboards are a must! I have been using ThinkPads for 25 years and they almost always have great keyboards. Even the "chiclet" keyboard in my "new" one, a seven-year-old ThinkPad T450s, is really very good: it has concave keytops instead of being flat, featureless slabs, and feels great. I hate typing on smartphones and tablets, and I'm amazed anybody can use such crippled devices as writing tools. Plus the darned things have tiny screens and no ethernet ports.
Finally, I have been using Linux on my ThinkPads for 25 years: another way to take back control from Big Tech.
I finally got around to trying FreshRSS. It took some time to get used to how it deals with hiding articles that have been read, and I wish there were a way to manually sort the feed lists. But otherwise, it looks pretty good and I may stick with it.
I've been using something called QuiteRSS. It's not perfect but it works well enough for my purposes.
The web site is https://www.bloovis.com/ . It has some stuff that is not on Substack, like all the content I was writing in previous years, some of which is probably embarrassing now. Also, after switching to Hugo a few months ago, I found that the search function in the theme I'm using is a bit broken, sorry about that. Need to hack on it a bit. Also, no commenting system; at one point I was using Wordpress with comments, and the email notifications and spam drove me bonkers.
In terms of fighting the digital fiefdom, I just posted this: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/how-to-be-czar-of-your-fiefdom. Fun synchronicity!
Great post! It's a big part of the reason why I'm focused on helping people be at least aware of Free and Open Source alternatives that they can use to at least be their own digital czar if nothing else. It's certainly much easier to make ourselves more resilient and adaptable than pleading with large corporations to bend to our will rather than...their stakeholders.
I'm definitely closer to the 100-110 range like you 😉
I have a question, but I'll post it as a comment on your piece.
Thank you for reading it, Gabriel! I'll look forward to your question there.
Good advice!
I already do a lot of this. Everything I write on Substack is written first on my laptop and viewed using Hugo (a static web site generator), then uploaded to my personal web site (on a VPS I control), then finally migrated to Substack. Because I'm a bit paranoid, I also back up this laptop to an external hard disk in my home, and another one off-site.
Because I follow almost a hundred Substacks and other info sources, I use an RSS reader instead of dealing with hundreds of email notifications. It keeps the info firehose in one place.
And good keyboards are a must! I have been using ThinkPads for 25 years and they almost always have great keyboards. Even the "chiclet" keyboard in my "new" one, a seven-year-old ThinkPad T450s, is really very good: it has concave keytops instead of being flat, featureless slabs, and feels great. I hate typing on smartphones and tablets, and I'm amazed anybody can use such crippled devices as writing tools. Plus the darned things have tiny screens and no ethernet ports.
Finally, I have been using Linux on my ThinkPads for 25 years: another way to take back control from Big Tech.
Good to hear!
What do you use for your RSS feeds?
I like FreshRSS and I like how it works.
My hope in the long run is that people get used to sharing .opml files to import each other's feeds.
I've been waning to setup a few feed aggregators of my own kinda like planet.gnu.org
What's your site?
I finally got around to trying FreshRSS. It took some time to get used to how it deals with hiding articles that have been read, and I wish there were a way to manually sort the feed lists. But otherwise, it looks pretty good and I may stick with it.
I've been using something called QuiteRSS. It's not perfect but it works well enough for my purposes.
The web site is https://www.bloovis.com/ . It has some stuff that is not on Substack, like all the content I was writing in previous years, some of which is probably embarrassing now. Also, after switching to Hugo a few months ago, I found that the search function in the theme I'm using is a bit broken, sorry about that. Need to hack on it a bit. Also, no commenting system; at one point I was using Wordpress with comments, and the email notifications and spam drove me bonkers.