Black Xanthus

Choose an unclear gender (other, agender, etc) and your data becomes less useful. Marketing campaigns are based on broad categories, like male or female, so choosing neither lowers your data’s value.

Similarly, lie about your education and your employment. Pick a made up job, be a wizard, or a spaceman. Jobs, again, are wide categories, so nonsense jobs, the more niche the better, the less they have to market things to you.

In theory you can do the same with hobbies, but three points of data, even made up data, is sellable somewhere.

Lie, of course, if you can. I’m sure there are more denizens of Hell on Facebook than the real place.

Where possible, choose other.

Damn, screwed twice by the same Ape…

In the modern world, I’m not sure a blog without advertising is going to work - especially hosted on your own domain.

You will have better luck with substack or koffi, who’s search algorithms will at least suggest related sites - and increase your visibility.

For decent views you are going to need a way of generating audience - that used to be Facebook and Twitter, but Twitter is dead, and Facebook is showing reduced returns of a saturated market. However, reduced is but 0, so it’s still worth throwing up a page.

After that, a public Mastodon profile will help in audience creation, but that’s very much a slow burn, and you’ll have to make sure you #tag properly.

I don’t know if there is, but it feels like the email protocol problem.

Like, while the protocol sucks in many, many ways, it would take something revolutionary to replace it because it’s everywhere.

It’s been around so long that everything talks the protocol, the binaries that handle it are mature and stable.

Then you have to ask: what would you replace it with? It does the job it’s designed to do very well. There’s nothing the matter with the protocol, and it’s still fit-for-purpose.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems - spam, bad actors, and so on, but ultimately that’s not the fault of the protocol (though, maybe, for email, people have been arguing about protocol-level ways of dealing with spam for years).

I don’t have an answer, but I feel like there should be one, but I doubt the is.

It’s also difficult to ‘leave’ chromium when many of the alternative browsers are based on the engine.

I love Vivaldi, but at it’s cute it’s running the Google web engine. This is also going to be part of the problem.

There are very few non-Google web engines, and even fewer being used by other browser makers.