Overhauling my internet hygiene

~voxparlour25

Current coffee: Maude Cafe Delas (V60)

I'm not going to lie - the future is scary. Even though I don't live in the US, having the most powerful nation in the world nose dive into fascism is a concern for us all.

One way I'm preparing is overhauling my internet hygiene and I just wanted this post to show what I'm doing, much of it likely being old hat for Geminauts.

First off: browsing. Aside from using Gemini much more for general surfing and checking the news, I've switched to Vivaldi as my browser of choice across devices. After trying a bunch, including Pale Moon, Libre wolf, and Brave, I settled on Vivaldi as my private browser of choice, using Ecosia by default for search.

I've been systematically changing my passwords to unique and highly secure versions with the help of KeePassDX, which lets me generate random passwords and keep them safe in a vault.

Ditching Google Play, which is one of the worst storefronts out there, to F-Droid has been a good decision, giving me access to a load of FOSS alternatives to proprietary apps. For instance, moving away from Reddit to Lemmy and accessing FOSS text application alternatives.

I've ditched Gmail for Proton to keep my emails from prying eyes and have also installed Proton VPN, which is a freemium piece of software.

No more YouTube app for me. After using and ditching Invidious I've settled on Tubular, a really great fork of NextPipe. No more YT rabbit-holes and no more algo-fuckery.

One of the biggies has been investing in a Pi500 as a desktop in a move away from Windows. Now, I do have a gaming laptop I'll be keeping Windows on because it was frankly quite expensive and I want to run all my games, but for word processing, general browsing and coding I'll be using Pi OS as my first foray into Linux.

I ditched Meta years ago and Twitter at the start of 2024 and have never had TikTok or any other social media. I have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, the latter of which I use far more often. But I'm also enjoying Midnight Pub and Smol Pub as ways of expressing myself and will probably be using these far more in future.

Ideally I want to one day get a Linux phone since I no longer want to run Android (I know Android is built on Linux but it's Google).

If anyone has any other recommendations then I'm all ears.