Self-Host Everything
Maybe not literally everything
but as much as you reasonably can. I'm just getting into this myself, I've been at it for about a month, but it's funny how reliable everything is when you can simply host it on a computer you own.
No prying eyes, no downtime (unless I just turn my server off), and it can be dirt cheap if you already own the hardware.
So far I've got the standard Jellyfin setup along with Memos, Pi-hole, and Wger for fitness tracking. I'm probably gonna deep dive through the Docker Hub and see what else might benefit me to install.
On digital autonomy
It really is weird how much of a hard pivot everything has taken. Services that were designed to keep people connected actually divide them, and everyone's data is sold to the highest bidders.
I'm at the point where I read the ToS on almost everything before registering, use a cloaked email address for everything, and have the beefiest spam call guarding I've seen yet (big thank you to Cloaked for the latter two).
Deleting "the essentials"
I recently deleted Instagram over concerns about monitoring, as well as just doomscrolling when I didn't even care to be on the app. It didn't happen too frequently, but definitely enough to give pause. I've now forced myself to use the browser version so that there's more friction.
I used to believe that I really needed Instagram installed so that I can continue to respond to people I work with. In reality though, we can always send links to music files over Signal or WhatsApp so it's really not a big loss. Even though the latter is still owned by Meta it at least has E2EE.
Tiktok has thankfully been long gone for me, and I don't plan to return to it until it's absolutely necessary for marketing purposes.
My girlfriend and I are off to go see Friendship in a few hours. I feel like so much and so little was explained by the trailer simultaneously, so I can't wait to see how it all unravels.