Testing the viability of using MEGA for hosting videos to replace YouTube (as part of my de-Googling) as noted in this post). I haven’t decided yet if I will also close the channel on my main account.
Why? My goal is to be over 95% free of these privacy infringing platforms by the end of the year/the first half of 2026. I am already off of Blogger, 50% off of Gmail (used for things like registration), 50% off of Google Photos (basically legacy collections of image/video media I used to host on Picasaweb which transitioned to Photos upon its EOL; the old 2011 earthquake and tsunami archives I’ll be leaving due to the historical data plus map info), and 100% off of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads). — IG will be closed next week since I forgot to download my data (had to log back in) Instagram closed.
Even though this localhost tracking was Android specific, this just goes to show how far Zuckerberg’s companies will go to tracking everything you do (I decided simply to take a ZERO trust approach for anything Meta). Social media (micro-blogging) wise, that small experiment with Bluesky is over (removing myself as I did earlier with X/Twitter).
In a much broader scope, I decided to also perform a self de-platforming (my own personal “declaration of independence” from these platforms) as part of this process. I’m undecided yet on Flickr except I realized I haven’t touched it in some time (my Pro sub expires towards the end of January 2026); I could simply “self-host” that using MEGA as well (though there is no import function for bringing over descriptions and I’m not a fan of the cryptic URL structure; Flickr’s isn’t much better so that is more of a “me” thing with the aesthetic). Test album on MEGA.
Note: I do realize that putting most everything on MEGA is like “putting all your eggs in one basket”. If any of this were really important, I definitely would not go this route. This is all in the context of side hobbies/interests. Like for blogging, I’d like to rely less on YouTube. Similarly on the creator viewing side, I’d like to be less on YouTube or Twitch + Discord as a comms tool. Which brings me to the following.
Discord and Twitch will be the last of the major platforms that I will deal with (lot of winding down to do plus there are old Discord servers I used to run that I need to archive). With regards to Amazon (and all of its subsidiaries which includes Twitch), I am dead set adamant on the “voting with my wallet” angle that has served me well in the past. I know there is little I can do with AWS (since so many sites utilize it). It’s more about the parts I can control/reduce my personal usage of where I am not heavily reliant on them for hosting things and/or spending way too much time on (metric speaking, watch time/viewer concurrency).
One Comment
Comments are closed.