I quit everything

title: I quit everything
published: 2025-02-19

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I have never been the social media type of person. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to socialize and get/stay in contact with other people. So although not being a power-user, I always enjoyed building and using my online social network. I used to be online on ICQ basically all my computer time and I once had a rich Skype contact list.

However, ICQ just died because people went away to use other services. I remember how excited I was when WhatsApp became available. To me it was the perfect messenger; no easier way to get in contact and chat with your friends and family (or just people you somehow had in your address book), for free. All of those services I’ve ever been using followed one of two possible scenarios:

• Either they died because people left for the bigger platform
• or the bigger platform was bought and/or changed their terms of use to make any further use completely unjustifiable (at least for me)

Quitstory

• 2011 I quit StudiVZ, a social network that I joined in 2006, when it was still exclusive for students. However, almost my whole bubble left for Facebook so to stay in contact I followed. RIP StudiVZ, we had a great time.
• Also 2011 I quit Skype, when it was acquired by Microsoft. I was not too smart back then, but I already knew I wanted to avoid Microsoft. It wasn’t hard anyway, most friends had left already.
• 2017 I quit Facebook. That did cost me about half of my connections to old school friends (or acquaintances) and remote relatives. But the terms of use (giving up all rights on any content to Facebook) and their practices (crawling all my connections to use their personal information against them) made it impossible for me to stay.
• 2018 I quit WhatsApp. It was a hard decision because, as mentioned before, I was once so happy about this app’s existence, and I was using it as main communication channel with almost all friends and family. But 2014 WhatsApp was bought by Facebook. In 2016 it was revealed that Facebook was combining the data from messenger and Facebook platform for targeted advertising and announced changes on terms of use. For me it was not possible to continue using the app.
• Also 2018 I quit Twitter. Much too late. It has been the platform that allowed the rise of an old orange fascist, gave him the stage he needed and did by far not enough against false information spreading like crazy. I didn’t need to wait for any whistle blowers to know that the recommendation algorithm was favoring hate speech and miss-information, to know that this platform was not good for my mental health, anyway. I’m glad though, I was gone before the takeover.
• Also 2018 I quit my Google account. I was using it to run my Android phone, mainly. However, quitting Google never hurt me - syncing my contacts and calendars via cardDAV and calDAV has always been painless. Google circles (which I peeked into for a week or so) never became a think anyway. I started using custom roms (mainly Cyanogen, later lineage OS) for all my phones anyway.
• 2020 I quit Amazon. Shopping is actually more fun again. I still do online shopping occasionally, most often trying to buy from the manufacturers directly, but if I can I try to do offline shopping in our beautiful city.
• 2021 I quit smartphone. I just stopped using my phone for almost anything except making and receiving calls. I have tried a whole bunch of things to gain control over the device but found that it was impossible for me. I found that the device had in fact more control over me than vice versa; I had to quit.
• 2024 I quit Paypal. It’s a shame that our banks cannot come up with a convenient solution, and it’s also a shame I helped to make that disgusting person who happens to own Paypal even richer.
• Also in 2024 I quit Github. It’s the biggest code repository in the world. I’m sure it’s the biggest hoster of FOSS projects, too. Why? Why sell that to a company like Microsoft? I don’t want to have a Microsoft account. I had to quit.

Stopped using the smartphone

Implications

Call them as you may; big four, big five, GAFAM/FAAMG etc. I quit them all. They have a huge impact on our live, and I think it’s not for the better. They all have shown often enough, that they cannot be trusted; they gather and link all information about us they can lay hands on and use them against us, selling us out for the highest bidding (and the second and third highest, because copying digital data is cheap). I’m not regretting my decisions, but they were not without implications. And in fact I am quite pissed because I don’t think it is my fault that I had to quit. It is something that those big tech companies took from me.

• I lost contact to a bunch of people. Maybe this is a FOMO kind of thing; it’s not that I was in contact with these distant relatives or acquaintances, but I had a low threshold of reaching out. Not so much, anymore.
• People are reacting angrily if they find they cannot reach me. I am available via certain channels, but a lot of people don’t understand my reasoning to not join the big networks. As if I was trying to make their lives more complicated as necessary.
• I can’t do OAuth. If online platforms don’t implement their own login and authentication but instead rely on identification via the big IdPs, I’m out. Means I will probably not be able to participate in Advent of Code this year. It’s kind of sad.
• I’m the last to know. Not being in that WhatsApp group, and not reading the Signal message about the meeting cancellation 5 minutes before scheduled start (because I don’t have Signal on my phone), does have that effect. There has been a certain engagement once, when you agreed to something or scheduled a meeting etc. But these days, everything can be changed and cancelled just minutes before some appointment with a single text message. I feel old(fashioned) when trusting in others’ engagement, but I don’t want to give it up, yet.

Of course there is still potential to quit even more: I don’t have a Youtube account (of course) but I still watch videos there. I do have a Netflix subscription, and cancelling that would put me into serious trouble with my family. I’m also occasionally looking up locations on Google maps, but only if I want to look at the satellite pictures.

However, the web is becoming more and more bloated with ads and trackers, old pages that were fun to browse in the earlier days of the web have vanished; it’s not so much fun to use anymore. Maybe the HTTP/S will be the next thing for me to quit.

Conclusions

I’m still using the internet to read my news, to connect with friends and family and to sync and backup all the stuff that’s important to me. There are plenty of alternatives to big tech that I have found work really well for me. The recipe is almost always the same: If it’s open and distributed, it’s less likely to fall into the hands of tech oligarchs.

I’m using IRC, Matrix and Signal for messaging, daily. Of those, Signal may have the highest risk of disappointing me one day, but I do have faith. Hosting my own Nextcloud and Email servers has to date been a smooth and nice experience. Receiving my news via RSS and atom feeds gives me control over the sources I want to expose myself to, without being flooded with ads.

I have tried Mastodon and other Fediverse networks, but I was not able to move any of my friends there to make it actual fun. As mentioned, I’ve never been too much into social media, but I like(d) to see some vital signs of different people in my life from time to time. I will not do bluesky, as I cannot see how it differs from those big centralized platforms that have failed me.

It’s not a bad online-life and after some configuration it’s no harder to maintain than any social media account, too. I only wish it wouldn’t have been necessary for me to walk this path. The web could have developed much differently, and be an open and welcoming space for everyone today. Maybe we’ll get there someday.