PLAN
In Linux systems, users may create a .plan file in their home directory. This "plan" is visible to other users via the "finger" command.This is the web version of my .plan, where I will talk about my goals, how I will accomplish them, and the progress I've made.
I hope you find it interesting.
Quit Social Media
To be honest, I've never been the biggest social media person, but lately I've come around the fact that it's just Not Good, and it's time to go.
In relative order of badness:
- Twitter - it when it became X. Even before I started thinking about moving away from big tech generally, this felt like an obvious one.
- Meta properties (Facebook, Insta, WhatsApp) - I went inactive on Facebook a decade ago; finally got around to deleting it a couple years ago. Never used the others, so this was pretty easy.
- TikTok - never used it, never will. I think by the time TikTok came around, I had pretty much figured out that social media wasn't where I wanted to be. Miss me with that slop.
- Reddit - this is a hard one for me. I have been active on Reddit since about 2006, and my current account was created in 2009. I curate my subreddits pretty heavily towards niche interests, but I think being on reddit less is still a good goal. My current plan is to block it on my phone to eliminate mindless scrolling, but to leave it unblocked at the DNS level so that I can continue to access reddit hits in search results (because in 2026, the only effective way to use a major search engine is to append 'reddit' to your search. Yeesh.)
- YouTube - IMO this kind of counts as social media, due to shorts and the algorithmic home screen; basically the same problems I'm looking to avoid on other platforms. Unfortunately, kind of like reddit, youtube is just too damn useful to get rid of entirely. So, here's the compromise: no using youtube logged in, ever. No apps, and the site itself is blocked on mobile to prevent random scrolling. Can be used on mobile via RSS (the Unwatched IOS app). I generally don't use youtube on desktop, so no special action needed there.
Quit Big Tech
I discovered The Opt Out Project by Janet Vertesi in early 2025. I was on vacation with my family at the time, and we for away from our dismal midwestern winter for a week, staying somewhere nice and tropical. As we tend to do on vacation, daytime was for exploring and adventuring, and nighttime was for reading or other quiet activities.
Well, I was so impacted by what I read on The Opt Out Project that I spent most of the evenings that week thinking about my relationship with big tech, online privacy, and the changes that I might want to implement for myself and for my family.
I will note up front that the "for my family" part has been the most difficult aspect of this, for a few reasons. First, privacy isn't free, and many of the paid services can get quite expensive when moving beyond individual plans. Second, I need to be able to manage *gestures wildly* all of this for my family, and (weirdly) those capabilities aren't neccessarily a given for many of the family plans available. Third, I need to acklowledge that this being important to me doesn't mean it's important to others. This process requires tradeoffs, and every person evaluates the costs and benefits in their own way.
With all that out of the way, here are the objectives:
- De-google, to the greatest extent possible.
- Ditch amazon services and devices.
- Reduce usages of apple services, where possible. This is an ongoing challenge.
Steps taken:
- I've ditched the Chrome browser as my daily driver and replaced it with hardened Firefox. Easy win.
- After a lot of research and effort, I got our email situation sorted out. To understand the work involved: I've been a gmail user since 2006. Mrs. Nullish and the kids were also gmail users. Luckily, when I first set email up for the kids, I had the foresight to do it via google apps for business (with a legacy free plan that I've hung onto). The upshot is that they were using gmail, but were able to switch without changing their email addresses, since I had them set up using a custom domain name. There was some grumbling, but kids adapt quickly, and overall it was pretty painless for them.
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Oh, I suppose I should talk about what we actually switched to.
After reviewing ALL of the options, I determined that the best way
forward was:
- Fastmail, for an affordable and easily managable family plan. This is not a particularly privacy focused service compared to the other big names that get thrown around in this space. However: in this instance, the main goal is to get away from google and attempt to dodge surveillance capitolism in some small way. Fastmail checks these boxes. I didn't mention this in the requirements, but the other big box checked here is that Fastmail works great with custom domains, and allows for the creation of unlimited "masked" (randomly generated) email addresses, similar to duck.com or apple's "hide my email" feature. I use this, perhaps excessively, and have come to subscribe to the philosophy of "each service gets its own unique email address." It's worked great so far.
- Personally, I supplement the above with Proton and Tuta email addresses, for any instances where I'd prefer not to use Fastmail.
- We stopped using google Drive and google Photos. Both were replaced with redundant local backups. The actual process of deleting photos from the goog is pretty difficult (by design, I'm sure), but I got through it.
- We got rid of all of our amazon Echo/Alexa devices. They are now safely tucked away, unable to listen in on everything that happens in our household. Thinking about how we thoughtlessly used these for so many years makes be cringe now, but eh - live and learn. We canceled our prime subscription, no longer use any of their services, and purchase from them only as a last resort. This definitely comes from a place of privilege, but I'll choose a more expensive (and maybe higher quality?) option from somewhere else vs ordering from them. I feel a bit of satisfaction every time I avoid buying something from amazon.
- This isn't exactly "big tech", but around the time I got rid of our echo devices, I replaced our wifi smart plugs and bulbs with local only devices that don't need to call out to some server in China to activate. Local only FTW!
Remaining challenges:
- Explore more alternative browsers. I tried Vivaldi, but wasn't particularly happy with it. Still on the list are LibreWolf and Brave.
- Remember how I mentioned that apple was going to be a challenge? Yeah...we are a big apple family, and I haven't made a lot of progress here. I think the next concrete step that I'm looking to take is to enable their Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature on all of our devices. The idea with ADP is that it increases the number of their services where E2E encryption is used, and switches to a setup where the keys are effectively zero knowledge from apple's perspective. This is definitely a small next step, but like I said, this part is really difficult. We don't have budget for replacing any devices right now, and trying to get my friends and family to use Signal vs iMessage, or trying to get Mrs. Nullish to NOT use apple photos are just not battles I can pick right now. Does this sound like giving up? I hope not. I thik the way to handle this (like many things) is with consistent, steady pressure that's directed to where it can do the most good. Right now, that means NOT focusing on apple.
Reclaim My Attention Span
I will write about this soon, when I'm less distracted ;)