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Escaping Enshittification: We're All Digital Migrants

personal

Layer 0: A Splinter in the Mind

Sometimes the most profound journeys begin not with excitement, but with unease.

It wasn’t a single moment that pushed me away from the Google ecosystem. Rather, a growing discomfort had been creeping in, building up. It was the targeted ads that seemed to know too much, the dark-patterns becoming the norm, the shift towards an opt-out vs opt-in setup. It was the realization that my life, all my documents, photos, and communications were all being indexed, mined for data. For profit. That a single entity knew everything about me from photos, contact names, calendar events, emails I was willingly sharing with them. That they could cut me off whenever they wanted.

Much like how migrants in the physical world are fleeing the horrors of war, famine, or persecution, digital migrants are fleeing things like harassment, enshittification, drag-net surveillance. By early 2021, this discomfort had crystallized into a decision to reclaim my digital sovereignty, to fight back in my own small way against what I saw as something deeply troubling and wrong unfolding in the digital space.

Layer 1: Breaking up with Google

The initial exodus was both liberating and terrifying. Within a few weeks, I had:

This first wave was the hardest. I had underestimated how deeply the Google ecosystem had embedded itself into my digital life. Every service required its own migration strategy. For example, extracting my documents from Google Drive meant downloading massive ZIP files, sorting through years of accumulated files, and establishing new organizational systems on Mega.

The password manager transition from Bitwarden to KeepassXC represented a philosophical shift – moving from a cloud-based solution to a local file that I controlled entirely. This meant new backup strategies and synchronization methods, but it also meant no one but me had access to my credentials.

Leaving Facebook was a surprisingly easy choice, given the Cambridge Analytica revelations, increasing advertising, and the general decline of genuine interactions and dialogue. I did end up maintaining a WhatsApp account as a pragmatic compromise to keep in touch with a select few important family and friends who simply refused to use alternative platforms. WhatsApp was the “best of the worst” options due to its end-to-end encryption and was better than keeping the FB account for Messenger. It was an important lesson about balancing ideals with practical realities and that, sometimes, maintaining important connections requires compromise.

LinkedIn proved simple to abandon entirely, especially seeing that I rarely used it, the professional benefits no longer outweighed the privacy concerns.

Twitter was different and the catalyst for my departure was specific: Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform. Having zero respect for him as a business leader or individual, his takeover became my tipping point. In retrospect, I’m profoundly grateful for this push. Media reports of the hateful rhetoric and deteriorating quality that followed the acquisition confirmed I’d made the right choice. In late 2022, I deleted my Twitter account for an account on Mastodon, a decentralized “microblogging” platform. Independent servers hosted users that could all federate with each other using the ActivityPub protocol. This fragmentation was initially frustrating, as it was harder to find people I was interested in, being no central server to index and curate content like with Twitter. But over time, learned how to use the tools, and I came to appreciate the separation. My attention felt less manipulated, my time online more intentional, people drove what was important to other’s feeds not an algorithm.

Most importantly, the Fediverse (particularly Mastodon) became something I’d rarely experienced online before: a safe space. I connected with talented and creative individuals who shared similar views on technology, gender, politics, and the world. For the first time, I didn’t feel alone in my digital values. This mental and emotional win cannot be overstated – finding community while pursuing privacy is powerfully affirming.

Layer 3: Beginning to Self-Host

Eventually, I was ready for the next level of digital freedom: self-hosting! I took several steps to start self-hosting wholly or in-part many of the services I used daily like:

This phase was technically challenging, but deeply rewarding. Setting up my own email server taught me more about email protocols, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than I ever expected to learn. The ProtonMail to self-hosted email transition took weeks of careful planning to ensure no messages were lost. This wasn’t a “pure” self-hosting setup however and it likely never will be. Primarily this is because I live in a part of the world that has unreliable infrastructure (both electric and internet). Trying to self-host on my own hardware from there reliably under such conditions seemed foolhardy. It was again better to compromise a little bit to get maximum benefit.

Layer 4: Refinement and Optimization

The migration journey continues on with ever-more-refined choices and changes. Some is driven by changes in the political or corporate landscape, while others are made as new technology, tools and projects/services become available or I become aware of their existence. Each of these changes represents not just technical optimizations, but philosophical refinements. Moving from large corporate services to smaller providers or self-hosted solutions was about reducing dependency of the greater online presence against any single point of failure.

Also, I’ve been taking pains to make sure that the software I use to interface with these services is FLOSS/open-sourced and supports offline modes wherever possible. For example, if my CalDAV server is down, this only means that I cannot sync my calendar between my phone and laptop, not that it stops working altogether. I am still able to use my calendar on my devices. Any changes will wait patiently for the next successful connection to sync with the server.

At the moment, I’m largely focused on moving all services off of US providers and outside of US government and corporate jurisdiction and reach. I don’t want to end up on some fascist list for my views and just for existing. I certainly don’t want to make it any easier than it needs to be to be.

Reflections

I share this journey not to show off my setup, but to demonstrate that digital independence is achievable and to encourage others to start thinking about it as something worth investing time and effort into. Yes, it requires research, patience, and sometimes technical learning, but it isn’t reserved for tech experts. Anyone with some determination can progressively reduce their dependence on big tech services. This wasn’t a weekend project! My migration journey spans years, with services being migrated one-by-one as I built up more confidence and skills. This gradual approach prevented overwhelm and allowed me to learn at a sustainable pace.

Chart of my digital migrant journey

A cruddy diagram is worth a thousand words. This flowchart shows the changes and progression of my digital life over the course of my journey.

The most significant benefits came from those initial migrations away from Google and Facebook. Breaking free from these ecosystems immediately diversified my digital footprint. All my eggs were no longer in a single basket, which reduced my vulnerability. The fragmentation of my digital life across multiple services sometimes creates friction, but it has also built resilience. No single provider outage can disrupt my entire digital existence. Don’t get paralyzed by the need to achieve a “perfect” solution! It looks different for everyone and, as you can see by my own journey, is an ongoing process.

Digital independence isn’t a destination but a continuing journey. Technology evolves, needs change, and new solutions emerge. My migrations haven’t always been perfect – some services proved to be temporary stops rather than final destinations. This journey connected me with communities of like-minded individuals. From Fediverse connections to self-hosting groups on IRC, I’ve found technical support and philosophical alignment that wasn’t present in my previous digital life.

As I look toward future migrations (like a planned move of domain name servers to the EU or possibly Canada), I’m guided not by perfectionism, but by the desire for incremental improvements. I know that each step takes me closer towards ends goals of a digital life that aligns with my values of privacy, the respect for human rights and the equality of all individuals. The very act of taking a single step, no matter how small, in the direction you want to move, is a declaration of intent, of support for those values, to the world around you. Your small step might inspire others to take their own small step. That is how we win.