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+title: Living according to values
+date: 2024-09-18
+draft: false
+---
+We, humans, are hypocrites and it's okay. To be a human is hard. There are many
+cases in every situation, it's a mistake to see everything naively in black
+and white. But it's important to notice personal hypocrisy and reassess the
+personal values on a regular basis and live according to them. I want to write
+down steps I've made in this direction.
+
+I value privacy. And over years it became a some kind of obsession and hobby.
+A never-ending journey to go deeper and thinking what and how I can do better.
+I think the first important step was a migration from Gmail to an alternative
+email service — Fastmail. It took changing emails everywhere and a long
+transition period forwarding emails to new address.
+
+The next one, even more important, is <a href="https://grapheneos.org">https://grapheneos.org</a>. Thanks I bought
+Pixel. Not only it sandboxes Google Play Store, improves security, provides
+granularity in sense of settings scopes and reduces tracking as much as
+possible, it also helped me to completely abandon Google account. The only
+thing besides GMail I was using Google Photos which I replaced with
+<a href="https://ente.io">https://ente.io</a>. Also 1TB hdd, yeah.
+
+After a few years of using Fastmail I decided to cancel the subscription. The
+main motivation was their attempt to cooperate with the Russian government to
+avoid being blocked in Russia. I decided it's not the compromise I want to see
+from an online service I use especially since they tried to do it preemptively.
+Also they are from Australia which is far from the privacy values (my general
+impression, maybe I'm wrong).
+
+I've moved to iCloud because they provided $1 subscription allowing to use
+a custom domain. It was a temporary solution to find a better replacement
+which in the end is <a href="https://protonmail.com">https://protonmail.com</a>.
+
+A bit later I've installed <a href="https://asahilinux.org">https://asahilinux.org</a> on my Macbook M1 Pro, coming
+back to linux after almost 10 years of osx experience. Works fine for me. This
+helped to delete iCloud account as well.
+
+I also have tried to delete as many accounts as possible on all websites I ever
+used. Turned out it might be not so easy sometimes. I also changed usernames
+where it's possible to reduce the links. Some kind of debt by using the same
+username for about 15 years.
+
+For example I deleted LinkedIn, because it's almost completely useless. I've
+found a job using it only once for all these years of email spam. Not worth it.
+Also dropped Twitter because it became useless when all interesting people went
+to Mastodon but I decided not to follow them. Got tired of social media. I read
+books instead.
+
+Same with github. I dislike the current data harvest situation with LLM hype.
+Also I don't contribute much nowadays and if I want to I would rather
+contribute to projects hosted on a private gitlab instance (such as GHC) to
+decentralize the open source projects. Sending patches over email also works.
+I host all my personal code on my own digital ocean instance via gitweb. 
+Using my own VPS allows to host my website, personal gitweb, and AdGuard DNS
+instance, allowing me easily to inspect, filter and block all tracking domains.
+
+Instead of Spotify I've started buying music on Bandcamp which means that my
+money reach artists directly without awful Spotify distribution schemes. Hello
+old offline audio players. I use <a href="https://powerampapp.com">https://powerampapp.com</a> for Android. It also
+helped me to start collecting vinyl records.
+
+The trickiest part so far is to migrate from Telegram to Signal. The network
+effect is strong in this domain and not many people willing to install one more
+messaging app. But if people care about my values and respect my choices they
+will do it. I will delete Telegram account as well in some near future and I 
+acknowledge that it's kind of social suicide as a lot of people and communities
+use it. But I don't care. Telegram became a social media app and all I want is
+a good messaging app that provides privacy.
+
+Overall this whole journey is an attempt to live according to my core values.
+To care about privacy, avoid corporations, using open source, choose small
+businesses and support nonprofit organizations (donate to Signal!). It hurts
+and it's okay. It also aligns well with my desire to spend more time offline.
+The current state of web feels unhealty and active enshittification is
+depressing.