Software doesn't have to be rotten, but it is.

For end users, you and me, the experience of using software is getting worse. If you've thought "Google use to be better" and been gas-lit by others that it's about the same, you're not alone.

I was born in the 80s, been using computers since I was young, working with IT systems for over 20 years, and a professional software developer to over 15. Computers are amazing tools, but like any tool, it can be used for many things, and not all of them are amazing or even positive at all. The most used software systems nowadays are actively user hostile, and are serving the creating company's stock price, rather than the active users.

Now, I don't hate computers. I chose this career out of a love for what computers can do. Games was my original passion, I loved the worlds it could show, and later learned to appreciate how games and the web enabled people to express themselves. However, I hate what they have been commonly designed to do to chase infinite growth.

If you have used the web, you have been essentially A/B tested into thousands, if not millions of different categories of interests, or facts about yourself. Profiled to make it possible to serve you commercial advertising at a hard to fathom scale, and speed. Most of this effort is still in service to commercial advertising dollars, but more and more is being used to directly influence large sections of different country populations to the whims of those that have the ownership, power or money to afford it. And it is about to get a lot worse.

Most readers will know all of this, what's new? However, there are a growing number of technically experienced people trying to raise the alarm bells to the general public about what can happen next if it isn't already happening. That is machine learning models, or what is marketed as "AI", is capable of sifting through the huge and growing amount of online analytics collected on all of us. From the sites you visit, how long you spend watching a video, or scrolling past a social media post, to far more invasive things like screenshots of your computer screen or TV, recordings from your smart phone, or travel history of your car. 20 years ago you would need human beings to sift through this mountain of data which was never feasible, but with growing compute and $100Bs to $1T of new investment into "AI Datacenters", this will become economical viable, and very attractive, to actively track and process data from everyone.

Also, now with "generative AI", it will be used to not only choose which ads are served to us, but it will create ads based on your behavior as well. Initially for large or common segments of the population, but as the technology improve, and data centers get bigger, these generative models will be able to do this almost at an individual level more quickly. Ads aren't necessarily trying to just sell you something, they are there to influence and manipulate you. This technology will have to power to essentially control a large group of people. I am not immune, and neither are you. It is already extremely difficult to completely avoid these applications, even as a technically inclined person, and way too much to ask of the general population who has become dependent on these systems.

There is a growing interest in self-hosted services from all this enshitification being done to modern technology platforms, apps, and services that BILLIONS of people use everyday. Software that is designed for people without an intrinsic profit motive at its core. This has been around for a long time in the open source space, since the 80s, the same decade I was born. However, the control of computers has been eroded away over the last 20 years through convenience, and hijacking of other industries, and only over the past 10 years has the noose of VC (Venture Capital) investment started to be tightened to squeeze you for every penny, along with powerful people realizing it can be used to sway large populations.

I created this site so I could dive into and share my experiences to hopefully understanding the problem a bit better, share resources I've found useful, and suggest alternatives, and to get a better understanding on the pain points to make them easier to adopt. There isn't a quick fix however. Despite the advances in usability of many open source alternatives, there are still a lot of points of friction, but here are some notable examples.

• Social Media - Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube
• Streaming services - Jellyfin
• Photos - Immich
• Code sharing - Forgejo
• Ghost - Blogging (powers this site!)

There are many others, but these are ones I've currently got experience with and self host for myself. Not everyone needs to or even should self host everything. All these services above can be shared among a group of people where one or most people can assist with the technical side of hosting or moderation while the majority of users just get to use it. We need systems like these that don't have the perverse incentive structures to get away from the current mainstream of systems to avoid the growing dystopian impacts we are seeing from these platforms.

If your are interested in this kind of topics, and want to provide some feedback, feel free to reach out. Here are some other people doing similar work that I can highly recommend.

• Paris Marx - Tech Won't Save Us, System Crash
• Ed Zitron - Better Offline, Where's Your Ed At
• Internet Of Bugs - YouTube