by rpdillon | 2025-06-13 22:06:56+00:00
This approach has been my central philosophy for years, and is why I dislike central app stores so much: they put significant downward pressure on hobby coders releasing their work, which leaves the store with a bunch of primarily commercial software, which aligns incentives around extracting data or money from users. F-Droid is a great counter-example that highlights this.

I think my decisions have panned out pretty well, in a /r/stallmanwasright sort of way. I caught a lot of side glances for using Linux back in the late 90s and early 00s (I wanted to load it onto some computers on LHD-4 during my tour aboard, but the command said it was a "hacker" operating system), but these days, looking at what Apple and Microsoft are doing, I'm thrilled to be using System76 machines for me and my kids.

Emacs has been a consistent friend over the years, and I still go back to it for anything text-centric. It's made the transition to the LLM-era quite gracefully. Tiddlywiki has also been a reliable source of value over the years.

I tend to not install apps for sites on my phones. They offer less control than a browser I can add uBlock to and just visit the site. Not always (I use the Amazon app, for example), but mostly.

In general, I've cultivated an attitude of reverse-entitlement: sometimes I really want things, but I have to stay real with myself that I don't need them. Some examples that folks will probably argue with, but are good illustrations of the idea:

I'm a huge fan of VR, and have had amazing times in Beat Saber and a few other games. I bought Quest and Quest 2, but when Meta locked me out due to a SNAFU with the Oculus/FB account mess up, and I was unable to file a ticket to get the account unlocked (because I couldn't log in), I lost $1000 in hardware and a couple thousand in VR software, but I just walked away. I realize the relationship was abusive, and that I didn't need Meta in my life. That was 2 years ago, and I still miss Beat Saber, but it was a good decision.

I had a LinkedIn account, and gave my name and email when I signed up. When my phone fried and I didn't have backup MFA, they demanded my state-issued ID to let me back in (rather than, say, verifying by email). I don't trust MS with my ID - they said they would delete it, but I didn't believe them (prior data breaches at ID vendors motivated me). But more importantly, it was an escalation: they didn't verify my identity when I signed up. So they should be trying to confirm that I'm the person who signed up. But they instead wanted me to verify I'm rpdillon, which is moving the goalposts. They're doing it as a transparent data grab. So I walked away. That was a few years ago; turns out I don't need LinkedIn!

There are probably dozens of examples like this, but I'll stop here, since this is already too long.

My core point here is: it turns out I don't need most of the stuff these companies offer, and they do seem to be getting increasingly abusive. I read about the WebRTC backdoor in Meta's apps last night, but I quit Facebook in 2009, because the writing was on the wall. I think the article offers a good perspective. This is quite at adds with opinions I read here all the time ("Libreoffice is a useless replacement for Excel", "It's literally impossible to program unless I have my liquid retina display", "Unless I'm rendering at 144Hz, it's like a slideshow", etc.), so it might be a _highly_ individual thing, but I thought it was worth mentioning, since it might be a fun discussion about how folks think of these tradeoffs.