Going Decentralized - Software - pt.0

Posted on 2020-07-18 Edited on 2021-12-17 In Going Decentralized

This project is abandoned, there will be NO continuation.
One day, I’ve been watching DistroTube’s video on something, and he mentioned Mastodon and LBRY. I’ve got curious and started to research, what it was about. Suddenly, after few hours of reading and researching, I just came up with an idea:

Let’s try to live my online live completely on decentralized web

And so here we are. During month of August 2020, I’ll be moving from my usual setup to a new setup, completely moving social platforms, office platforms and software I’m using. Let’s dive a bit deeper into it.

Setup

Computers

I have two computers that I use daily - my desktop running Windows 10, and my Dell notebook, currently with BunsenLabs linux (great distro). I got used to them, so it’ll be kinda tough for me to move OSes and do new configurations for everything. Anyways.. I’ve bought new SSDs for both my machines, and I’ll be switching them. If you want full config, head out to pc specs page.

OS

Obviously, I want to use mainly FOSS. That means no Windows. Linux is not something scary and unexplored for me, as I mentioned, I run Debian based distro on my notebook that I use daily. So no problem with that. But I wanted a bit of a change, something I’m not used to. Since I’ve been using Debian/Ubuntu based distros mainly, I decided to switch to Arch based distro. Manjaro to be exact. Why not Arch? Because I don’t want to go with the hassle of setting it up on two machines. Manjaro just works, I’ve used it for a while when I was testing out PineBook Pro, and it’s kinda great. Other than that, there is no specific reason why I chose this distro.

Blockstack

I wanted to find something similiar to Google Suite, where you have a lot of things packed into one place. Google Docs, GDrive, GMail, GMaps, Calendar.. you name it. So after a quick google search, I’ve found Blokstack. They say that

Blockstack apps give users direct ownership of their internet assets and protect user privacy

which sounds great. Blockstack is a sort of framework on which different apps are built. There are quite a few of them, covering most of basic things including XOR Drive (Encrypted cloud disk), DMail (Decentralized Email), Arcane Office (Decentralized alternative to GDocs) and many, many more that can be found on Dappity or Webby.

Office

I do some office work, obviously, in MS Office suite. Which I’m incredibly used to, and literally cannot work with anything else, like OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Lately however, I’ve been trying to adapt to Google Docs, because, in case you didn’t knew, you cannot (you can but.. shus) install MS Office on Linux (and thus work on my laptop). And I quite like it. It’s a bit wonky, but in my opinion, still better than LibreOffice.
So, instead of those, I’ll be using mentioned Arcane Office. It have all necessary editing options I need, it autobackups on your cloud storage and honestly, it looks pretty good.

Cloud Storage

Speaking of cloud storage, what should I be using instead of GDrive? Well.. I have a Mega drive, which could be a great replacement, since it’s encrypted and it’s code is on Git. However, I’ve decided to try new things, so Mega is out. I’ve found two alternatives that can work. One of them is pDrive, which.. doesn’t tell much on it’s frontside. It’s UI is extremely minimalistic and easy to use. Second option is XOR Drive, which offers 10GB of space on it’s drive. It’s also minimalistic and hopefully functional. I’ll be probably using pDrive however.
By the way, as I was browsing through different apps, I’ve found BlackHole. Which is some kind of file sharing thing, where you can upload a file, send a link and someone else can download it. It doesn’t upload to one central server, but rather distribute it between users, similiar to how Torrent works. I’ve found it pretty cool, except it’s 512MB file size limitation. Still, I’ll give it a go.

There are many alternatives to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. I’ve picked Debut as Facebook alternative. It looks nice, functional and not bloated. Which I like. And of course, Mastodon. I’ve never used it, but from what I’ve seen, it most resembles Twitter, but with more functionalities than feed. Those will be the only social networks I’ll be using. I also looked at feed, but I think that project is abandoned and they have some serious design problems (the text of feed displaying outside of the box) and makes it unusable.

IM

I cannot really imagine a world without instant messaging apps. To this day, I use 4 (yes, 4) IM apps to communicate with different people. I’ll be dropping 3 of them, leaving only Telegram, since I’m using it more and more, it’s FOSS, secure and really, I won’t miss anything from previous ones. As of Discord, few friends that are willing to will be moving together with me to Matrix, which is absolutely awesome project. Be sure to check it out. However I need to make one exception here, because not everyone is willing to switch platforms/have other ones. And I wont force my boss or parents to download different app because I want to use something else. So I will have to use Facebook’s Messenger to communicate with only a few people that I know won’t switch.

Music

I’m using Spotify. Almost everyone is using Spotify. Which is OK, I like it, but.. not gonna do for this. Instead, I’ll be using my personal music vault. More than 100GB of music should get me going for a month. For streaming it however, I’ll be using Diffuse, which takes music from your storage and.. well streams it on the internet. It looks very cool, and should work well with my freeNAS storage.

Videos

Well.. here is the second of two exceptions. I still be watching videos on YouTube, since there isn’t really much alternatives to that (except LBRY, which I’ll try using) with so much content.

Other

Some apps aren’t worth its category, for example calendar, maps or to-do lists. All those are clickable, so if you want to see which of those I’m using, click on them.

Updates

I’ll be posting weekly updates here on this very website. Those weekly updates will have 7 chapters, each for one day, where I’ll discuss what I’ve found, how do I feel about certain things and so on. Obviously, I’ll be posting daily banter on some of my social medias, so be sure to follow me anywhere you like. Here are links to my profiles:
Debut
Mastodon TBA