Believe it or not, I owe Tumblr a lot for getting me to understand the value of online freedom today. No, it's not because the website abused mine even though I know now that it totally was. It was the community. What? Yeah. Even a crowd as crazy as Tumblr's can do some good, as dubious as that may sound.

So how did it all start?

Tumblr hivemind

Tumblr has been notorious for having a community with a passion for social justice and empathy (for some things), helpful or otherwise. Links to crowdfunds, petitions, and news articles of dominant groups' abuses often graced my Tumblr feed. It was this (fickle) empathy the Tumblr community had that led me to be wary about dominating groups' power. Further down the line, my women studies course encouraged me more to be conscious about that power. But Tumblr users passionately informing others about the first threat towards Net Neutrality was my first introduction into online rights. When I searched and read up about Net Neutrality, people who were online privacy and security advocates were mostly the ones talking about it.

Interest

Privacy as an issue was something that really caught my interest. I could resonate with it, having parents that didn't believe children had the right to even some of it. What more, I had lived my life online for the most part. I poured my entire life online as a Gen Z kid growing up to an MMORPG called Flyff, having a Friendster profile when I was maybe 7, getting Facebook at maybe 9, a YouTube account at probably about the same age, and having Tumblr from maybe 12 .

First look

I had so much at stake, I needed to learn more. So I turned to the only resource I knew of that tended to curate as much information as possible into guides, which was Reddit. It was through the r/Privacy SubReddit that I learned about the ugly truth of what those fun, free, online services were doing. I learned about things like surveillance/data collection/tracking. r/Privacy also led me to PRISM break and privacyTools.io, with which I learned what services to try to quit.

At one point, I ended up watching the Snowden movie, which only reinforced my concern for privacy. I had to at least try escaping Facebook for a start. I looked for the alternative on PRISM break and found Diaspora. I made an account and had the service auto-pick a pod (like Mastodon's “instance”) for me. However, I found the public timelines were barely ever populated and the hashtags I was interested in were empty. I tried to use it, but it felt pointless to me. Back then, I don't believe Mastodon was listed. For the time being, I was stuck with popular social media.

Breaking point

I think those events so far have occurred when I was still in high school. I then hit university. In history, we read articles and had a discussion about Snowden, surveillance, and Facebook. My women studies course made me aware of just how powerful dominating groups can be, and I learned how harmful such forces had been. It taught me they've been capable of atrocious things and privacy being abused is not only possible—it's the reality.

Then the second wave of the threat to Net Neutrality came. Tumblr spurred once again and did not fail to let me know. Everyone was posting about it. At this point, I have already been hearing distant talks about further Facebook scandals, different services collecting data, Apple, Google, and everything for quite some time. Net Neutrality being attacked for yet the second time was the final push for me.

Using Battle For the Net as a guide I composed a letter to send to my representatives in congress. I posted about the threat on Facebook and Snapchat to let my friends know and encourage them to contact their representatives or raise awareness at least.

But then saving Net Neutrality failed.

Then I really felt how heavy it was—this control higher powers had over our online experience. Even though it was hard, I decided I really needed to get serious and couldn't ignore how badly online rights is attacked. I couldn't deny any more that it was affecting everyone including me despite everyone around me acting like it wasn't.

Rabbit hole

Other than privacy I also learned to be relatively more secure like using a password manager instead of repeating a password, which was KeePass for me. I took all my photos out of Google Photos and never went back to it. I stopped using automatic Facebook or Google sign ups for new services. I switched to DuckDuckGo. I think you get the picture. But I yet to have a replacement for all the social media I was using.

Lost and found

Then I remembered I ran across a confusing website once in the past. Somehow, either from a link in Tumblr or elsewhere, I remembered there was another social media site that looked vaguely like Twitter but felt complicated and obscure, like only techy people would know about the site. Like Diaspora. Could it be? Is it another possibly more active service that had similar values as Diaspora? I wanted to look for it. Again, I don't think Mastodon was listed on PRISM break back then, which I trusted more than privacyTools.io. Somehow, maybe through privacyTools.io or elsewhere, I found Mastodon. And here I am now.

Mastodon: Into the Fediverse

Getting started with Mastodon was no easy task. I even made this very sad post on Tumblr at one point.

But I kept on trying. Something in me wanted to despite how frustrated I was. I guess no matter how frustrated I was with how tough it was to try to find people to follow, I was more frustrated with surveillance capitalism. And because Mastodon was different in that it had a very active Federated timeline, I felt like I actually had a chance in finding people versus in Diaspora.

And it was all worth it. I found a great and supportive community. I find more things to help me switch from proprietary services with their help. They continue to help me when I'm struggling.

The present and future

So where am I now? Though I keep Windows in case I need it for university, I use Kubuntu pretty much all the time and haven't had to switch to Windows for a good while. I'm gaining interest in self-hosting and encryption. I continue to look to Switching Social for more resources to privacy that are more accessible to myself who isn't that technically inclined.

But isn't it pointless?

Even through all these efforts, pretty much I'm already and still am a victim of having a boatload of information harvested off me. There's just too many ways to keep track of someone. But how would I feel about not even trying?

#tumblr #privacy #surveillance #surveillanceCapitalism #floss #foss