#contentwarning #content-warning #cw #longpost #nsfw #istilldkWhichOfTheseWorkOnTheFediverse

It's been 10 months since my last post on quitting big internet, so I suppose here's my checkin on the status of things!

Apple, Facebook, & Amazon were previously reduced to a minimum, and that hasn't changed. The only real challenge here continues to be AWS. I've gotten a bit of practice with openstack, and I'm actually really excited about a couple of projects I have down the way working with it.

Microsoft: LinkedIn continues to be the main issue. I've installed Linux Mint on my gaming PC and tried to make it as gaming friendly as possible. Steam's Proton compatibility layer works fantastically for most of the games I've tried, but VR continues to be a sticking point. I've also had to go back to Windoze in order to run decryption programs for some hard drives I've found to be infected with Teslacrypt. I was able to find software to decrypt these drives, but they only run on Windows for some reason.
I also was able to convice a community center to convert their computer lab (mostly for elementary-age kids, but also for adults) from Windows 7 to Linux Mint, in advance of Win7 EOL. I will probably write up a post about that, but it's so far been an excellent experience. Non-profits that target kids stand to benefit SO MUCH from FLOSS - educational software is really a shining point of the libre world.

Google: Again, we subdivide here because Google is such a beheamoth.

Android: Nothing has changed here. A way to root my phone has possibly appeared, but it seems incredibly sketchy, and there doesn't appear to be a way to actually sideload another ROM onto it. So, I'm stuck looking forward to a future Pinephone or possibly a PyraPhone.
I also have a Lenovo Yogabook with android, which I've rooted and installed AnLinux & XServer, so that I may have a debian environment in it. I actually love this setup a lot, though I'm still trying to get things to be to my taste.

Google Maps: i'm in a similar place as to 10 months ago, but with some slight improvements. Nextcloud now features a "map" extension, so I can mark locations and such within my private cloud. It's not the best experience on mobile, but there's active development, and I'm super hopeful. There's even routing once you connect to an OSRM server! I plan to deploy one of my own, potentially.

Google Voice: LOL no progress at all. Hilarious bc this is the most privacy-concerning one.

Youtube: I've actually gotten a good place here! Using youtube-dl I've written a script to get 1080p+ videos downloaded as a cronjob, with three kinds of categories:
- Subscriptions are handled by tinytinyRSS. Using the generated feeds feature, the script will look for new videos and download them. Using tinytinyRSS has the added bonus of being able to filter channels for only videos that match certain criteria.
- Music videos, lols, and miscellenous interesting videos are queued in a text file, to_dl. The script looks for URLs here, and will download them to the corresponding directory.
- Channels are handled a bit differently. Because some channels have a ridiculous amount of videos, instead of downloading each video, the script will just grab the URI of each video, convert it into a kodi-readable m3u playlist file.
I then just add these folders to kodi/jellyfin, and voila! This actually works as a _better_ experience than before. All my media is now centralized.
There is a major ethics consideration here, however. Since each video is only downloaded once, but potentially watched multiple times, creators are robbed of some views. They also do not get any analytics. Most of the content I watch is primarily funded through patreon and such, but this is still something to think about.
Discovery also goes down, but that could also be considered a plus, since the recommendation engine does not come into play at all.

Anywhoo, continue to decentralize, y'all! peace ❤