Digital Homelessness

"Modern" "World"

As you're aware, the internet is getting more widespread everyday. The web, computers and smart devices are gaining more attraction everyday. For most people though, the internet is just proprietary junk social media sites (inst*gram, tw*tter etc.) Social media's bad effect on socialising and the mind is an important topic for another day though.

Digitally Homeless People

(Digital Hobos maybe?)

Tragically and a bit ironically people who use the internet the most use the least amount of websites. They just "browse" their "feeds" for several hours EVERY day. What made the internet different was it being the wild west, it wasn't centralised. Remember how people used to call it the web? It deserved that name back then, if you were to visualise it, it would've looked like a spider web. Hundreds of pages and sites connected to each other. Now there are 5 companies and 10 services. That's it. These are also all San Francisco companies. The entire world runs on these services which are dependant on a single city. People spend 1/4 of their day looking at content from this single city.

Imagine company websites as hotels. You have the right to reside and hang out. Hotels can't turn a profit without guests but don't care about you individually. Companies tend to get evil and only care about profits. Manipulation en masse, deciding what is and what isn't "bad" content and removing it. Feed algorithms, only showing you things that you want to see, or what they want you to see. They also censor groups and ideologies that they don't like. Best case scenario would be to stop using it but since it's a social norm, you'll come back :) You'll keep posting while self-censoring so you don't get banned or outright stop posting. That's the life you're gonna live as a digital homeless.

Moving Out to Your Own Place

• *"Enough is enough!"** you may say or even **"I want to break free, I want my own place!"**. Then great! You've come to the right place. Use this guide as a rough idea to save yourself from digital homelessness. Don't forget, you don't have to do these in a day, take your time and do it at your own pace. Make sure to make several backups along the way and find alternatives. Have a Plan B for every service you use in case it doesn't work or something happens.

• Rent / buy a domain.

Make sure the domain is to your name and is in your control. If not, you're not in charge.

• Rent a VPS or pay for webhosting for your page.

If you're not experienced with virtual machine's you'll have to learn some things, but will be less painful in the long run.

Install an SSL/TLS certificate. **Do not pay for them!** Let's Encrypt gives them for free!

• Use email (except gmail).

Backup your mail periodically. Have a plan B mail provider / service. If a custom domain being used for mail learn how to setup your own mail, incase something happens.

• Use RSS.
• Use torrent for (legally :D) obtaining TV shows and movies.

Cleanup Time

Escaping tech giants when you start using alternatives!

• Get a copy of your data of the services that you're using.

You might need something even if you don't remember it now.

• Straight up delete your account. No freezing, no nothing, deletion. You might want to keep your email address though, just incase you need it. Delete everything in it though.

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