Fight Enshittification
My data belongs to me. And I want to own the products I buy.
In 1999, I registered my first domain and have been an early (and young) adopter of the WWW. It was the times of geocities, sourceforge and phpBB where everybody would build their own (private) website, create new forums for their hobbies or chat with tools like ICQ. Blogs and RSS where new formats and “web 2.0” was not even born yet. Later tools shifted more and more to company controlled service like facebook, google or amazon and the 💩 enshittification began.
I’ve seen a lot of services coming and going. The decline often happened because of decreasing quality but what frustrates me the most is the “lock-in”-model and the lack of interoperability. My enthusiasm for open source might be one of the reasons why I strongly advocate against the walled gardens big tech has introduced. And it induced me to use alternatives wherever I can.
Fortunately, in Germany you are allowed the make so-called “Privatkopien” (eng. private copy). There are several laws involved and courts have made decisions, but basically I am allowed to make private copies of works I own, e.g. copy ebooks to my personal ebook reader, even when it was not the intention of the company from whom I got the ebook. Even though DRM free media exists, it is not always the case and there is also a huge difference between “owning a copy” and “owning a license which allows playback”1. I prefer to control the stuff I’ve paid for.
After becoming independent from enshittificated services and therefore using tools like nextcloud, matrix/element, jitsi or openhab, I also followed that principle for content. All that above is why I run servers and software on my own. It is mainly possible because of open source ❤️.
During the last 1.5 years I’ve rearranged
- 📖 ebooks into calibre-web and audiobookshelf
- 🎧 the latter also for audiobooks
- 🎬 movies and TV series into jellyfin
- 🎶 music and music videos with navidrome2
All this excellent software has so much features, is steadily improved and let me have control all by myself. I am capable of the management and provide everything for my family. What is the difference of leaving a (physical) book on the couch where everybody in my home can read it, or providing the ebook via the advplyr app?
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This is a complex topic on it’s own, too complicated for a short paragraph.
But what I still don’t get: why is it considered “stealing from a company” when you do not own “your copy”? I surely understand that it is considered illegal when you take something without paying, but when the seller can revoke my “right of usage” without compensation, e.g. when going out of service, only companies are protected not citizens. ↩︎ -
navidrome is running for 5+ years already, so this feels already ordinary ↩︎