re-repatriating my online presence

Deja vu all over again. I did this the last the the bad orange man was elected, and before that back in 2008, but this time I’m going a bit further. It sucks. This is hard, and I know it looks performative and theatrical and melodramatic, but it’s something that I think I have to do. I’m sad and frustrated and pissed off that I even have to think about this nonsense. I’m conflicted on so many levels.

Scott Leslie asked some good probing questions about why I’m doing this. I mean, it’s not going to make a difference in the big scheme of things. I’m under no illusion that this will make a difference anywhere. I’m pretty sure nobody from The Administration reads my blog or follows me on Mastodon.

I think it’s partly that I need to do something in response to a literal fascist government that has become belligerent and hostile to its closest friends and is threatening to “annex” my country¹. Insanity. These are not normal circumstances. This isn’t about patriotism or jingoism or punishment. I can’t fix the chaos, but I can reduce my exposure to it. And maybe part of it is just grasping to be able to take some action, no matter how small and insignificant, in the face of everything.

So. I’m working through the process of moving US-based things onto Canadian-based services, and deactivating or cancelling whatever I can of what remains in the US.

I’ve moved my Mastodon account from the excellent and fun social.ds106.us (I mean, I can’t really have a good chunk of my online presence hosted on a .us TLD) to the CoSocial.ca cooperative. The migration seems to have been pretty seamless and mostly automatic. My performance art Tinnitus Bot account is still on the DS106 server. I don’t know if I’ll migrate it or just let it disappear. It’s run its course.

I’ve deactivated my Facebook and Instagram accounts. I had to keep Messenger because that’s the only way I have contact with several important friends and family - but the account deletion panel said I’d be able to continue using Messenger after deactivating (just not FB or Insta). Later, I got a notification on my phone about a new message in Messenger. So I click the notification and get a “Welcome back” notice before seeing the thread. And then I get an email from Facebook saying my account has been reactivated. So, I’m guessing “you can continue to use Messenger after deactivating your Facebook account” actually means “You can never ever deactivate your Facebook account”. Which means I’m stuck in the “do I continue to have contact with people I care about, or do I delete my Facebook account entirely” dilemma. Fun!

I’ve deactivated LinkedIn and LinkedIn Learning. I won’t miss the toxic positivity and “You’ve shown up in 48 searches! Pay us money to see who was looking for you!” etc.

I’ve cancelled my Amazon Prime account. Should have done that years ago.

I may cancel Netflix (I would in a heartbeat, if it was just me, but I’m not super eager to impose my own decisions on family members. I won’t be using it.).

Strava. I don’t know what I can do there. I’ve got a decade’s worth of fitness data in there, and there’s nothing that comes close to it. I’ll need to think about this one some more…

And iFit. The software that runs my NordicTrack s22i indoor bike. It’s baked in and impossible to change - I was going to hack it to use Zwift (also US-based) or something else, but that will be a pretty big project.

I was resisting the urge to move my websites off of Reclaim. The company and its people are outstanding, the service is incredible, at a good price. But. A service provided by a US-based company, even if physically housed in a Canadian datacentre (operated by another US-based company) is still a US-based service beholden to the whims of whatever BS gets whipped up. I finally decided to go ahead and move to FullHost, a non-cloud hosting company with a datacentre in Calgary. Reviews were decent, and it’s not running on top of any cloud platforms so it’s not just a US-platform reseller. If you can read this, the migration is complete².

The one that will be the hardest (most impossible?) to move or cancel is the Apple One subscription. It’s so deeply baked into the operating systems of my phone and laptop that it’s not feasible to just cancel it. Backups, file sync, and photo storage/sync³ are pretty important, and there just isn’t a viable alternative - and certainly not a Canadian one.

So I haven’t been able to eliminate everything, but going down to 1 and a bit US services is progress. And what a stupid, self-flagellating waste of time this is.