Back in June, I wrote about this need to disconnect/unplug more often (and that also touched upon these centralized platforms that most people have converged on where the influence of those companies, have been able to dictate and shape what, where, and how users consume various forms of content. And since these “free” platforms monetization are based on harvesting as much personal information on the user (you are the product) in order to tailor highly targeted advertisement to those users, it has been this race to exploit technology for those purposes versus being used mostly for actual good.
De-platforming is a term that usually refers to when that platform removes individual users (for their views, politics, etc). However, there are those of us taking that steps ourselves (self de-platforming) as a cognitive choice and going back to running our own services (free from those platforms algorithms, policies, control/access to your data, etc). For the longest time, I ran my own servers (for DNS, email, web services including a basic web server and more complex content management systems) until around a decade ago.
After a certain point, I entrusted at least my email to iCloud (I never used Gmail for very personal email for obvious reasons) while self-hosted sites fell out of favor when people began spending more time on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Twitter’s microblogging became a magnet for short/quick tidbits of information that could easily reach a lot more people (relegating old style blogs such as this into a niche). It’s basically that one megaphone which can reach many (and the larger that megaphone in terms of priority, it gets magnified in the algorithm to reach even more people). Similarly, vlogging (video blogging) also took off as the video quality and data speeds (to upload such content) increased.
These changed the way many began to consume content and news; something that corporations picked up on where the main things they thought about was how all of this could be monetized (in order to increase shareholder value at all costs). This mentality of unchecked capitalism has been caustic to societies in general (as is the case with how corporate executives view AI as a method to reduce expenses by reducing human headcounts under the guise of increased efficiencies/productivity from that technology). But rarely does that translate into benefits for the regular people (the ones who make out are the executives and shareholders).
The algorithms these social media platforms utilized (to micro target content to users feeds) were of course weaponized over this past decade to also divide people versus actually solving the problems that they could have been solving. And more regular people see the negatives of this now where some of the old ways are coming back into use again (what’s old becoming new again).
Initially, it used to be a fringe group of techie people that decided to move back to self-hosting/self-managing their own data; myself, I sort of fell into the middle where I also didn’t really embrace most social media platforms (using ones like Facebook at the cursory level and that again was mainly just to keep myself in the loop when I was a Facebook shareholder).
But as these corporations began proving they were willing to use AI (machine learning) to harvest peoples copyrighted data without their consent/without any form of licensing or compensation for training their models, that was when I started the process of transitioning away from Blogger (and removing myself from other social media platforms even if I was barely using them).
Blogger worked well for my use as a place to just post stuff without a filter (and I didn’t have to manage anything). I also didn’t care if it reached an audience or not (as that was never a primary goal). But the fact that Google owned the platform (since 2003); it was always one of those things that bugged me (because their modus operandi has been to harvest what data they can without letting those privacy policies get in their way).
Sure, there is nothing stopping these companies from scraping self-hosted sites (unless registrations and walls are put up as a first line of defense). All it means is making it less convenient (where they have to expend effort versus folks like myself sitting directly on their platform where they can easily siphon off what they want).
One of the things I did not get deeply into in 2025 was federating these sites (via ActivityPub). I have my media hub site on the fediverse but it’s been mostly rudimentary and one way. They are still isolated silos that I’m planning on getting onto ActivityPub as a complimentary alternative to the old RSS feeds that used to accompany the sites when they were on Blogger (I’ve enabled those feeds again on this and my gaming blog). RSS itself has continued to remain relevant (for podcasts) but is also seeing renewed interest as more begin using/setting up their own sites again. IMHO, ActivityPub should’ve incorporated bringing in those RSS feeds.
RSS back in the day was great (and still is great); you could build feeds of tailored content from different sources (that always linked back to their originating site). I recall I was following/subscribing to thousands of sites feeds but could build these very customized sources of news/info where you didn’t have to go and visit each site to find each of those postings yourself. Yahoo Pipes made this a literal “pipe dream” to do but Yahoo unfortunately completely shut down that service in 2015. The endpoints (rendered back into RSS) were fed into the portal site that I used to run (showing up as a news feed in a sidebar) or as a more comprehensive list of links in a “news” section of the site. But for most users, they need to use something like an RSS reader for the feeds they follow/subscribe to.
ActivityPub helps to allow users to see such decentralized content on other federated platforms in the format native to that site and allows users to follow and interact with the content on those platforms. In the case of my media hub, each video is like an individual posting on its federated presence on Mastodon and Vivaldi Social (they aren’t actual physically created accounts that exist there; it’s more like a logical extension of my own site. But as noted earlier, it’s still pretty much one way until I add some additional pieces of code that allows me to interact from my own sites.
The key point to take away is this de-centralized nature of how ActivityPub operates (where the above post looks like it is posted from an account on Mastodon.social, but is really this video posting from my own site and presented by the actual Mastodon site to look like it is coming from an actual account there).
With that said, while Threads is also federated via ActivityPub, it is still a broken implementation (like my content doesn’t show up as a thread while others have noted things like replies don’t work or they end up disappearing). The only thing that seems to work properly is being able to follow others on the fediverse. It’s not like Meta doesn’t have the money and people resources to address it. It’s more about wanting to keep users on their platform because they have this self-interest to not lose users to some de-centralized platforms.
This leads me to the remaining platforms that I am on (like Discord, Twitch, and YouTube). I’ve already concluded that ditching YouTube completely will be difficult. Thus it’s more about time reduction of use of the platform. Discord and Twitch are definitely in the expendable category, but I am taking a gradual approach to that in terms of continuing to reduce the footprint and time on them. For Twitch, this is more so after seeing how Clancy has been allowed to remain as Twitch CEO even after all of his screwups.
In 2024, Twitch was really an enjoyable time (but one that began to decline throughout 2025 which is when I made a cognizant decision to reduce time on the platform). As a result, I did manage to cut (in more than half) the amount of watch hours spent on Twitch compared to 2024 from 5.5K to 2.4K hours (which is still too much). But there are also more negatives than positives nowadays plus fewer creators whose goals I feel I can continue assisting with/contributing to, where I do find myself becoming more detached (which on the flip side, has the other effect of allowing me to become absorbed in the stuff that I have let slide including working on these sites as part of this self de-platforming).
Basically, the enjoyment/fun of tuning into various non-gaming type channels that I had in 2024, is very much on the decline now. The channels I am a volunteer for is the only thing keeping me from deactivating now. But once they have more or less achieved their objectives and/or reached that point where I’m no longer useful in assisting in that capacity, it will be easier to step away.
Finally, there is a part of the Twitch “experience” that is THE driving force of putting a “nail in the coffin” for me; various philosophical differences with how many (especially creators) treat their personal privacy (more so when they also possess others folks personal information). That part I have concluded is an uphill battle and well, adults are making the decisions they are making (for better or worse, it is all fun and games until someones personal info gets leaked/doxxed).
The final verdict (and how it ties back into the subject of this post): I can choose to use my (limited) time on that endeavor (trying to convince non-technical folks about stuff that ought to be “common” sense which yes I know, isn’t so common at all) or engaging in things that are more within my control (like working on my de-centralized sites and just going back to being more of a digital hermit again by minimizing my time on these remaining platforms). And that is a no brainer (choosing to spend time on the enjoyable things that are within my control which will also allow me to spend more time “touching grass” and spending that extra free time with family).
