Let’s face it. The Internet has become shit.

Between AI slop, robots posting and robots responding to boost engagement, and the BIG AI companies building huge data centers that are raising utility bills on unsuspecting people, this is becoming evil incarnate.

I can’t stop them but I can’t support them, either. Here’s what I am doing:

Replacing Microsoft

I’ve been a subscriber to office 365 for a few years, but the price is going up to add AI Copilot to MS Office. Microsoft cancelled my subscription assuming I would renew at the new higher price, but I was prepared for this eventuality.

The truth is the Office part of MS 365 is one I rarely ever use. Mostly I use it to check grammar and spelling of my visual novels.

I’ve replaced it with LibreOffice which has all the same functionality of MS Office, but none of the cost, because it’s open source. It uses ODS an open source format for word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations, but it can covert these to the standard DOC and XLS formats used natively by MS Office.

The programs in Office 365 I used most often was OneNote and OneDrive, these both run over the internet and without a Office365 subscription I will lose both.

OneNote is a note taking app which I use a lot, but there are many note taking apps. Two good ones are Joplin and Obsidian are both popular, free, and can port the contents of OneNote to their own format which is standard markup language.

I find Joplin the easier to use for notes, searching, and downloading important web pages. Obsidian has a cleaner interface and can handle flowchart type notes. Both have sketchpads when words aren’t good enough and you need to draw a note. I’ve also tried Notion and Milanote, but their functionality is crippled without a paid account. Joplin makes money with Joplin Cloud subscription that saves your notes on multiple devices, but works with other clouds including a private server.

Joplin works with OneDrive cloud which I used to have, but I suspect Microsoft will kill my access soon. So I signed up for pCloud, which looked pretty expensive at $100 for 500gb, that’s about twice what others charge, per year. But this is the price for LIFETIME. Over time that’s one hell of a deal. Pay for two years, never pay again.

So far so good, but what about email? Outlook used to be good for email, but the accounts no longer work on Thunderbird or any other 3rd party client. I prepared for this a long time ago. I bought a custom domain in the early 2000’s and set up domain forwarding to whatever free email address I could find online. Well with the breaking of outlook.com emails, I switch to proton mail, and just changed the forwarding to that new email address. Because proton mail has end to end encryption, I had to pay for a proton bridge service so I can decrypt on my PC and have my mail appear on Thunderbird, like I wanted.

I’ve now replaced the need for Microsoft 365. I still have windows 11, and probably will until Daz Studio supports Linux.

Replacing Google

This is a tougher request because Google is all over the place, but it is possible to replace parts of Google.

First and foremost is the problem of replacing of Google Search, which is covered with ads these days and getting thicker, and now it has switched to AI searching with even more ads. Worse Google tracks everything you do on their site, so they can sell that data to advertisers. Google’s peak was around 2007, and it has been getting worse and worse.

Two routes to go here. If you want a free alternative duck duck go which does not store any information about you, and it’s search results come from a combination of it own web searches and Bing. Still you’re going to get ads. For fewer ads, try Qwant which is similar in style to Duck Duck Go in that it is privacy based and some of the results come from Bing. The negative is that it does not refresh the results as fast, so if you are searching for a news report it may not give results for a day or two.

Or you can pay $5 a month to go ad free with https://kagi.com/ Not only is it private, in that nothing you search for is tracked, but because you are paying for it, you can customize the results. Don’t like results from twitter? Block it, and it won’t search there. I de-emphasize sites that hide behind a firewall, preferring news from sites I subscribe, or sites that don’t firewall stories.

After enshittifying their search, Google is now working on their Android OS. Reports are you won’t be able to “sideload” apps into Android anymore. This is bad for several reasons. Sideloading is needed to test apps before distributing. My games are only available on Android via sideloading, that will likely end soon.

I think my next phone is going to be a GrapheneOS or a linux phone. These OS’s can’t be searched by authorities as easy as Android and iOS can. Might be something worth considering in the future.

And then there’s YouTube. A necessary evil unfortunately. You can use Nebula or one of the other alternatives.

But only on YouTube can you watch PewdiePie explain to you how he got rid of Google. See also r/degoogle for more helpful suggestions.

How to handle META

Lets face it, Meta (aka Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) has been replaceable for a long time. Use TikTok instead. The problem is that TikTok is just as bad, as any of the Meta stuff, or YouTube for that matter.

I like Bluesky. The biggest difference is between Bluesky and the other stuff is that it is not driven by the algorithm. It has one and it sucks too, but with a couple of clicks you can turn it off. See Bluesky post 1 for how to get started, and post 2 to make your own algorithm.

Reddit is social media without algorithms, with everybody upvoting and downvoting to see what gets to the top. I also like it because I can pick what topics I want to see.

Here’s the thing. Every social media algorithm can be bypassed. The problem is that social media hides the ability to do so. But once you learn how, it makes these sites so much better.

Take Facebook. Now Facebook used to be where you follow friends and family, and it was good for that. Then they started shoveling paid shit, and algorithm shit, and suggested stranger shit, and videos from TikTik shit. Some of us are still on Facebook because of friends and family, so here’s how you control it.

First rule of fixing Facebook: DO NOT USE THEIR SHITTY APP!! It’s basically spyware. Not only does it monitor what you do on Facebook, it monitors what you do on other apps. To stop it, open up your browser (yes phones have browsers), and go to facebook dot com, click on the left (or hamburger menu) where it says “feeds” then click on “friends”. You still may get some random ads (because this is Meta after all), but mostly you’ll see ONLY your friends posts. Then after looking at that get off facebook. Same rules apply to Instagram. (And Threads too, but why are you on Threads at all?)

Go to Bluesky. It’s “friends” feed is called “Following” and can be found on top.

YouTube also has a way to bypass the algorithm. It’s called “Subscriptions” and it shows all the latest videos from channels you subscribe to. This is usually my first stop on YouTube.

The Best solution is get off social media as much as possible.

Read a book, watch a movie, go for a walk, listen to music, play a game. Create something just for yourself to enjoy.