The world is always changing, there’s no denying that. But the latest haps have many of us quite worried. Society at large seems to be hurtling towards fascism, a vocal minority of affluent and angry men propped up by big tech dragging us all deeper into the ugliest depths of humanity.

I singled out Big Tech there because it’s something that probably the majority of us are actively participating in. But it doesn’t have to be this way! In this post I will outline some of the alternatives available to the big social network platforms, hopefully giving you some inspiration to step away from these increasingly toxic places.

Are you still downloading .exe files like some kinda chump? Check out Scoop, a package manager for Windows not too dissimilar to Chocolatey which ought to be very familiar to any Linux enthusiast. It’s fast, it’s easy to use, and it’s open source. Yes, Scoop is great but this article is not about extolling the virtues of the package management tool.

There are a lot of questionable ethical behaviours going on with big technology companies these days. Hearing horror stories from Meta (formerly Facebook,) Alphabet (Google,) Amazon, Microsoft and Apple has left me with a rather sour taste in my mouth. I’ve personally been stung by bait-and-switch campaigns like when OneDrive revoked large amounts of free storage and LastPass nerfed their free tier subscription. The former was ultimately reversed with a workaround but I was shook; these big companies can make drastic changes to these services I rely on at a whim.