Decorporatizing

From Wiktionary:

decorporation (noun)

1. The therapeutic removal of radioactive material that has been absorbed by the body
2. The legal revocation of a registration/charter of a corporation (or Limited Liability Company) operating to the detriment of the state, nation, and/or world.
3. The act of becoming no long corporeal.

Bang on, I say.

Thoughts

• Does it count as nostalgia if it genuinely was better? Because computing used to be. The web used to be. And not just a little, either. What we had then is not even recognizable in what we have now. I don’t like this, I don’t want this. There’s no technical reason why we can’t have the stuff that was good, again.

Progress to date

I started this in earnest around mid-2025, in cahoots with @valsombra. At this point I had already been off of Facebook for years, but still had a zombie Instagram account. I had already left the site formally known as Twitter for Hachyderm and the Fediverse.

Things I’ve done and am doing for myself

• I’m learning how to self-host my own services. I’ve set up Jellyfin and Forgejo for myself so far, and am now looking into a Fediverse client (perhaps GoToSocial), NextCloud, and Immich.

• Switched from iMessage and Discord to Signal.

• I’m switching from Visual Studio Code and JetBrains Rider to AstroNvim as my primary develoment environment. For my own personal work this is effectively done. For the day job I still haven’t fully replaced Code in my Java stack, and I would like to get on that.

• I’m dropping .NET in favor of Rust for my personal projects. That might seem a strange leap but I’ve always slightly missed working in C, and it feels good to be so close to the metal again. This is effectively done since I’m only working in Rust right now, but I still have a lot to learn.

• I’m moving all my desktop systems to Linux. I brought an end-of-lifed iMac back into service on Linux Mint as a place to learn Linux and self-hosting (a delight to use). I moved my gaming computer from Windows 11 to Bazzite Linux (10/10 would recommend). I’m gradually doing more and more of my daily life on Linux, while keeping an eye on Fedora Asahi Remix for my M1 MacBook Pro.

• I’m moving from iOS to GrapheneOS. This one’s going slower than I would like; it is very uncomfortable discovering how entangled the phone has become in my life.

• I’m moving my public GitHub software projects to Codeberg, and my private projects to a self-hosted instance of Forgejo. This actually does make coding more enjoyable for me again.

Things I’ve been doing with others

• Started co-hosting (with @valsombra) twice-a-month community potlucks, to get people together in person instead of always online. I was skeptical people would want to get together so often but I was wrong and these have been very fun and restorative. It helps that we have such a lovely community of weird and interesting people.

• As an offshoot of the potlucks, we started helping people move off of corporate media to the Fediverse, Signal, and even a few Windows 10 to Linux migrations. As an offshoot to that we assisted our local community action group with mobile security, switching to Signal, and hardening their device settings.

• As I learn more about self-hosting, I’m working toward setting up shared services for my immediate community: social media, file and photo sharing, collaboration software, and so on.

An incomplete list of things I’ve yet to do

• Get off Instagram and LinkedIn
• Explore mesh networking and get a node or two online