Why should I follow this guide?
Honestly, the modern internet and digital experience can be a bit depressing. Every movement you make is tracked in order to serve you the most targeted ads, services are now an arm and a leg in subscribtion costs, and social media algorithms can make people feel disconnected rather than connected. This guide will hopefully help make your life a bit less reliant on corporations, and overall improve your time on the computer.It will go through four things: Open source software, the indie web, privacy, and the piracy debate
Free and open source software
There's some amazing open-source alternatives to most mainstream software made by a dedicated community who are constantly adding improvements. Using open-source software, in my opnion, is the first step to de-capitalising your digital experence and avoiding buying subscriptions to corporations with questionable morals. Here are some of my faves:LibreOffice: open source, free office365 alternative, has an equivalent to word, PowerPoint and excel, as well as an illustrator, database and maths editor. It is genuinely very good, and I'd highly recommend it even if you can afford office. I'm currently writing this on LibreOffice Writer, actually.
Inkscape: SVG editor, graphic design. It's VERY good for SVGs and graphics, completely free and constantly updated
Blender: everyone's heard of blender by now, but it's an amazing 3D modelling and animation software that I will never stop talking about. Take the time to learn it, it's difficult but so worth it. It is also good for 2D animation! Blender Greasepencil (included with blender) has finally gotten good enough so I can recommend it to fellow 2D animators. It's a bit complex, but very good for a free software AND you can play about with 3D objects in your scene if you want! Just use anything but adobe animate.
Krita: Great 2D art and animation software. I never got the hang of it (gave up at age 13, lol) , but it is generally considered very good.
Gimp: a great alternative to photoshop, though not an exact replica. Used widely by designers and editors. I don't use it personally but have heard many good reviews
Scribus: desktop publishing software for page layout design. Used to make books, magazines, newsletters ect. Great alternative to adobe InDesign or Microsoft publisher.
Github allows users to share their projects and code, and so many more brilliant open-source projects are there. There are thousands of projects you may want to check out or even help contribute to!
The indie web
If you're on this site you probably know a lot about this already, but if you found your way here not through neocities, you may not know much about this side of the internet. The indie web is a general term for independently hosted, often personal websites, that act as a way for users to discover content, share ideas and connect online. It acts as an antithesis to social media and the corporate web, while being intensely customisable and personal. There is an entire community surrounding it, and sites like neocities.org and nekoweb.org allow users to easily code and host their own websites for free, especially being focused on personal website hosting and discovering other's sites. It is a brilliant break from the destructive algorithms and corporations underpinning social media, all while making the web experience a bit more joyful and personal. This site is an indieweb site, fully coded by hand by me. There are art sites, photography sites, blogs, general personal sites ect. There is SO much to get into in this field, so if you're interested, indieweb is a good place to start learning more!If you want to fully host your own website with your own server and domain name, eliminating the need for sites like neocities, landchad.net has an amazing tutorial that goes through setting everything up. It's actually not as difficult as you'd think.
OR on the flipside if you don't want to learn how to code but still want to have your own page, lurk.me allows you to create your own page easily using drag-and-drop, and join in with a community of others doing the same! I have my own, it's super fun to see what others have made.
Privacy through VPNs, ad blocking, and browsers
On the internet, you should have a VPN in order to retain your privacy and obscure your IP address. VPN encryption stops your government, ISP and bad actors seeing your browsing habits and even what you input into websites. VPNs can also help curb targeted advertisements.Paid ones are the best (I use nordVPN personally). However, Mozilla has recently rolled out a free VPN for a lot of countries inbuilt into their firefox browser. It only works for traffic within firefox, but it is super good as a reputable free VPN. I've heard ProtonVPN is free and good too, but I haven't used it personally. I'd be wary of trying any other free ones as they may be viruses or sell your data. The TOR browser is also a good free alternative. It's a browser designed to completely obscure your IP and details on the internet, and works somewhat like a VPN. HOWEVER! It comes with risks. Your Internet Service Provider can see you are using the TOR browser, and in it can be reported to police and be used by police as a reason to go through your device, as TOR is often used for illegal activity (it is the gateway to the 'dark web' after all). This will not happen unless the police are already onto you for whatever reason, but if you are not a criminal or going to be accused of being one, it should be fine. But it is something to be aware of.
Targeted adverts facilitated by the selling of your data are frankly disgusting. The best free adblocker is Ublock origin. It is a browser extention for chrome and firefox, and it blocks ads incredibly well. It is also open-source, so it is constantly monitored for any sign it may be malicious, which nothing is ever found. I have used it for years and can thoroughly recommend it.
For maximum privacy, the TOR browser or LibreWolf (a fork of firefox) are the best. However they may be overkill for the average person. TOR is often used to get onto the 'dark web' and access onion sites, so it can be seen as dodgy by your ISP. LibreWolf doesn't save ANY data, so you will have to re-sign into every account whenever you close the browser. For an average user, firefox with its inbuilt VPN, ublock origin and privacybadger (blocks trackers) should be more than enough.
Piracy
Piracy is one of the cornerstones of the internet. I'm sure you've heard many people both for and against it. Her's my two-cents on the debate surrounding it, and why it (and other methods) can be used to reject corporate greed in some cases.(DISCLAIMER: THIS IS HYPOTHETICAL EDUCATIONAL ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST MEDIA PIRACY. IT IS NOT MEANT TO CONVINCE YOU TO PIRATE MATERIAL)
Argument against piracy: the people who work on creative projects such as music and films deserve to be paid for their work. Companies cannot continue to exist without fair pay for their products. Counter: our current methods of media consumption are not fair to the artists or the consumer. Often, piracy can act as financial protest against corporations, while people fund artists in other ways. I go into specifics for each media type below.
Music: streaming through Spotify alone will never give small artists a liveable wage (roughly £0.002-£0.004 per stream, split between singers, producers, label ect) and most artists will rely heavily on merch sales and concerts to make the bulk of their revenue, as Spotify does not pay nearly enough. Spotify profits off of the exploitation of artists, as well as other ethical concerns you can read about here. Free alternatives such as youtube music and deezer exist, but both also have ethical concerns. Qobuz is an amazing alternative, but it only has a paid subscription tier. It pays artists very very well, and I recommend them if you have the money. However, many people cannot afford a subscription. Instead, they may one-time purchase an album they like through Bandcamp, a music buying service, that allows artists to sell digital copies of their albums for their own price. This gives the artist way more than if you were to stream the album a dozen times on Spotify, and can mean a lot if they are a smaller artist. It is also cheaper in the long run than a subscription. Furthermore, if you know an album that isn't on Bandcamp, you could pirate it to see if you like it, and then buy the CD. This once again gives more money to the artists than Spotify streams ever would, while being a one-time purchase. I will always encourage buying the album over piracy, but if you can't afford it at the time, then there is an argument for illegally downloading the music and then buying at a later date.
TV: There used to only be one or two paid streaming services. £10 a month or so for every show you'd need. But companies have realised they can keep making streaming services and spread out the shows between them, forcing users to subscribe to many different ones. Now there are about a dozen I can name off the top of my head, all requiring a monthly fee for all of two shows you'd want to watch per service. This is a worsening problem, too. Some argue that if we keep just giving in and paying to an ever-growing amount of subscription models, they will just keep making more. That's why, many people take the stance that if a tv show you want to watch is not on the two-or-so services you subscribe to, then you may just want to pirate it. And piracy is not convenient! It's a full of delays, viruses and risks. You do NOT want to pirate a show if you don't have to. But piracy is now more convenient than the legal route, and that shows how ridiculous this system has become. You could argue the only way to show that you will not stand for the inconvenience and extortion of modern day television is by refusing to pay. If you refuse to pay for more immoral streaming services, in the future they can no longer exist anymore to exploit you out of money. Using your consumer power to reject greed. And, you can use your saved money to buy the DVD or see movies in the cinema, supporting the original creators that way. Torrent sites can also be a fantastic archive of media, sometimes allowing people to watch shows that have previously thought to be lost.
Video games: now this, in my opinion, is a bit more nuanced. Video game marketplaces such as Steam do give fair money to the original creators, and indie video game companies and creators deserve to be paid for their work, and I can't think of an argument not to spend the money to buy a game from them, unless the creator is unethical. However, you could argue large video game companies such as Nintendo have frankly become unaffordable for the average consumer. The switch 2 is still £500, and its games are often upwards of £70. Even with inflation, this is often just too much, and it can be argued price inflation will only get worse if consumers pay it. Video games are infinitely copyable, and though initial production costs are high, Nintendo will make their money back 100-fold easily. Some may say the only way to force their hand into pricing their games a reasonable amount is to frankly just not buy it. Furthermore, actually owning a video game seems to be becoming a thing of the past. Nintendo and other game companies have stopped giving physical cartridges, rather it seems you have bought a 'lease' to your game, and they are able to take it away at any moment. Many say that if buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing.
Books/articles: once again, there's a lot of nuance here. Buying books and academic papers is good, and I implore you to support your local bookshop and authors wherever you can. However, many believe information should be accessible to ALL, regardless of financial circumstances. This is why many people are supporters of textbook piracy, as someone should not be disadvantaged in school because they can't afford the books. Some books are also just not available legally, such as banned books or rare books, which you can only find through piracy sites. Remember, sign up for and USE your local library. They get more funding the more people use them, even if you just go and sit there. More funding, means more free books you can take out legally.
Software: software licensing can be VERY expensive, especially when they're often necessary for hobbies or jobs. For many it depends on the company and they recommend researching a company's ethics before buying their software. If a company is unethical, yet have a monopoly on software, you may need to use their services for compatibility with others while not being able to afford it or wanting to support them. Here, pirating the software could be seen as valid, as supporting the company is not ethical, yet using the software is unfortunately necessary.
