Category: InternetCategory: Internet

From the Technically Good newsletter, on digital sovereignty.

“Reminder that “The Cloud” is “someone else’s computer,” and if that computer happens to be under the purveyance of someone who isn’t completely rational, that could be a problem. File under: Digital sovereignty. … especially since also, someone can, in fact, just turn off your cloud, leaving you without your data.

That link leads to “Over 170,000 Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?” over at Slate, and it’s tragic:

“The small nonprofits left behind are now visibly struggling. The childhood healthcare nonprofit operator I spoke to lost about 500 gigabytes of his firm’s data … The man who runs the disability services nonprofit wrote to me that it’ll take him and his mother “hundreds of hours” to fully re-create the instructional videos and documents that went poof.”

Leaving all your data to one company is a risk, no matter how big they are (Google Drive, Airtable), or how benevolent (like Proton). Local and off-site back ups are crucial, but unfortunately not everybody knows about these practices, or how to implement them (I’m doing two calls this week on breaking up with Google).

For one, download your email list often. You just never know when a service might shut down, or you get locked out!

Once you’ve got your cloud files on your own computer, back them up somewhere off-site (I use Backblaze, but pCloud and Jottacloud looks pretty good, too).

Off-site means your files are safe if your computer breaks, or your house burns down. Yes, these services are “someone else’s computer” still, which is why we seek the best solutions we can, rather than put our trust in the giant companies who grow too big to care.

Whenever I see people being hopeful about returning to the way things were, there’s always someone saying “we can never go back,” and I think that’s hilarious.

Like, are we really going to jump to yet another social media platform? Did we all jump to Mastodon, or one of the 19 different Instagram replacements? I keep having conversations with people who are done with signing up for new services, creating new accounts.

And sure, is this cognitive bias? YES. My job is talking to people who dislike social media, who want to get away, who seek a different path – heck yes, I am biased.

On the other hand, are you thumbs up with Musk / Zuckerberg / Mosseri? Are you ready to invest your time, effort and energy into the same old same old?

Are we content to keep following 3000 people? Reading 30 new articles every hour? Watching 5 hours of video per day, 13 seconds at a time?

Or are you ready to buy DVDs and CDs and magazines again? Talk to your neighbors? Seek community?

I know which direction I’m heading.

This from Jésabel DC at Config 2026 (this quote at the 1:08 mark):

“Technology wasn’t better in the early 2000s because designers were more ethical or more thoughtful. It was better because they hadn’t yet be handed the business model that rewarded trapping the user.”

She says “in the early 2000s the internet was a place you visited,” and then you went on with your day. I like to say that I just want to visit the internet, I don’t want to live there.

I was asked recently on a podcast interview what I’m running from in regards to social media, and I’m not sure I gave the best answer but I’m still thinking about it (which is why we appear on podcasts and face questions we’ve never been asked before in real time).

But I guess I’m running from one thing – the idea the social media is neutral, when it’s in fact user-hostile, designed and built by people with multiple vacation homes ensuring I spend hours everyday scrolling, engaging, and filling my head with every last drop of drama, turmoil, atrocity, and outrage.

That’s what I’m running from, I suppose. As Jésabel DC says, I am running from “the business model that (rewards) trapping the user.”

If you bought movies in the UK on your Sony Playstation, some of those movies will soon be deleted from your account.

“Sony said that affected customers will lose the ability to stream titles including Outrage: Way of the Yakuza, Paddington, Paddington 2, Pan’s Labyrinth, Rambo 3, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas “due to our content licensing agreements.” As of September, Sony will remove any affected titles that UK users bought from their PlayStation library, per the notice.”

Oh, and the Sony Playstation is going to stop making game discs in 2028, meaning you’ll buy all your games… digitally.

There’s a rumor that Bandcamp cut “most of the remaining engineers,” prompting some folks to download their purchased music just in case the site goes dark (the site as been sold twice in the last few years, I think).

The digital goods economy is fragile. In the never ending quest of convenience, we’ve paid for things and let someone else store them, whether digital music, movies, or even our websites on sites like Squarespace.

Like Morpheus said in The Matrix, “They are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys.”

He was talking about Agents that prevented people from escaping, but that seems like an apt comparison. Are you gonna buy CDs again? Blue Rays? Host your own website? Manage your own email list?! Are you really going to escape this system?

I said “maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer” back in 2024 and it’s just becoming more true by the day. The allure of all this centralization was convenience and reach. Then, after all these years of handing over our entertainment and audience to the corporations we end up owning nothing.

Start today. Download your data. Make back ups, both locally and in the cloud. Own your work. Build a website and host it with someone you trust. Host your videos. Buy a record (or a digital download) direct from the band.

Or, put all your work into the hands of corporations who will wipe out everything you’ve worked on (sites like MTVNews, Spinner.com, folks who amassed legions of fans on social media etc) with a press of a button.

If you lose access to your Gmail account, then what? That’s why I say your email is important enough to pay for, because if things go sideways, good luck reaching any for help!

I’ve been using Fastmail since 2014. I ditched Google Workspace in early 2025.

If you’d like to have less Google in your life, get on one of these calls. They’re not webinars. They’re not step by step walk throughs. These are for people scared, uneasy, afraid to tackle this sort of things alone!

• Monday, June 15th at 9:00AM EDT → https://luma.com/qebt5cj9
  
• Friday, June 19th at 11:00AM EDT → https://luma.com/1k3gnx6a