Once upon a time, the internet belonged to everyone. No matter who you were, you had a space here where you could freely write about whatever you liked. It was free from the control of the media and governments. In recent times the online experience has been decimated by corporate greed. Ads everywhere, you must pay a subscription, give us your email address, agree to these cookies, agree to our privacy policy, oh we UPDATED our privacy policy, oops all of your data has been leaked! You get the idea... However, there are still tools out there that enable one to still be free online. Lets have a look at some alternatives to popular online services. Spotify and Netflix? ... Try Bandcamp + Plex, Jellyfin, Piracy and physical media A great way of supporting your favourite artist is to buy music from them directly. Sites like Bandcamp make this possible. Bandcamp will allow you to download high quality files of the music you pay for as well as physical media. These purchases can be streamed on the Bandcamp app but if you dont want to rely on that, it is possible to use a service like Plex. You can run the Plex server on a NAS or any old computer you have laying around. It doesnt have to be special. Once installed you can access your downloaded music through your Plex account. Plex, however is a closed source app and have had several data breaches in the past. An open source alternative to Plex is Jellyfin. Same setup but none of the code is kept secret and has a great support community around it. Another alternative is to use these services in conjuction with physical media. Programs like Exact Audio Copy will allow you to make perfect rips of your CDs into a file format of your choice. If you already own movies on DVD and Blu-Ray and have a compatible drive, you can use applications like Handbrake to rip high quality files from them and use on your media server. Of course, you can always go the piracy route. If you want to avoid DRM and the likes, sites like The Pirate Bay are still around and with a client program such as bittorrent, you can add yet more media to your own server. After all ... if buying isnt owning, piracy isnt stealing. Social Media? ... Try site building and private chat servers Unfortunately, there really isnt a social media platform out there where you dont have to interact with a corporation of some kind. Of course, there do exist places like Mastodon and Bluesky, but none of these are immune from being bought out by a large company. For this blog I am only interested in systems that are largely separate from the corporate world. If you want a place to make your own, learn how to build your own website! A nice example of a service like this (with a charmingly retro aesthetic) is Neocities. They allow you to create a site completely of your own design while they take care of the server backend! If you dont mind the learning curve of running your own web server (like I did), you can use almost any old PC to run it. I will not go into too much detail here as there is a LOT to cover, but using that plus a DNS host like no-ip you can have your own site completely self hosted! If you want a fun place to chat with friends, there are still many IRC servers running. You can use clients such as WeeChat (Not to be confused with WeChat, the Chinese messaging app) to connect to IRC servers relevant to your interests. There are also paid clients like mIRC which offer a slightly easier user experience. As IRC is only a protocol, anyone can run an IRC server. Including you! The more people do this, the more independent spaces we will have online and can take some small steps towards making the internet a free and enjoyable experience.