arfy's musings on privacy:
This is a great post and resonates on so many levels.
I used to be like this, for ~25 years. It was extremely difficult in the later years. It was easier in the days of dial-up BBSing, and when the internet was much younger. Privacy and anonymity were very much the de facto position back in those days of the early 90s. I have wild stories of hacking and phreaking back in the day, but those are tales for another time.
Anyway, life and work got in the way, and I eased up on this position. Feelsbadman, but it is what it is. :goberserk:
I still value my privacy, use VPNs and things like tailscale with my own hosts around the globe to protect my privacy. But I'd be a liar if I said I 100% cover all my tracks, all the time. Far from it.
Kudos to anyone still making the effort to remain truly digitally clean. It's such hard work, and I respect people highly for trying to maintain it. :MEOWDY:
It's at a point now where it's almost impossible for me to use the "regular" internet. I can't access half the sites. The reason? I care about my digital hygiene and thus use a VPN. Sometimes switching to a different VPN or switching the country of the VPN works; other times it does not. Oh well, I guess I'm not going to watch that video, or read that article, or look at that picture. Whatever.
In addition to that, if I'm not blocked completely, I have to prove that I'm human every step of the way. Captchas, re-captchas, Cloudflare checkboxes, the whole shebang. I am human. I promise. And I am very annoyed. Outright angry, even. I doubt that any robot will ever be as annoyed as I am right now about the current state of the internet.
What annoys me most, actually, is that all these measures don't really work. There's bots everywhere. Robots get access to the stuff anyway, using farms of humans, just like in the good old days of WoW gold farming. The centralized "safety" nets of Cloudflare et al brought down large swaths of the internet multiple times in the last couple of weeks alone, and as things centralize more and more these outages will happen more and more.
I'm very close to breaking up with the legacy internet. I'm human, I can cryptographically prove that I'm human, and I have sats to spend. But the legacy internet doesn't care about that. It cares about farming me and my data, while annoying me to no end. I've been nostr only for a while now, but that was only on the "social media" side. 2026 might be the year where I go nostr-only for everything, or to phrase it slightly differently: permissionless for everything.
No more "are you human?"
No more "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
No more cookie banners, paywalls, and AI slop.
No more being treated like a child.
Even if it means that I'll have to self-host everything.
Even if it means that I'll have to build & maintain stuff myself.
Even if it means that it's a lot of work and pain.
Nothing worth having ever comes easy.
But the easy stuff is not worth having in the first place.
Here's to the year to come, and the new corner of the internet, build on cryptography and webs-of-trust. Real value. Real connections. Real humans.
Here's to nostr.
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