Last week, I took a deep breath and took my first step towards owning my own data and moving away from corporate ownership of everything about me. My friends and family relationships? Meta through Facebook controls what I see about them and sells info on these relationships. My shopping? Meta follows me across websites and hoovers up the data. Google, too. Microsoft peeks in on my Bing searches like Google can with searches on its site. Jeff Bezos through Amazon tracks my every browse and purchase. My medical information? Any unaware healthcare practitioner using Zoom or WhatsApp leaks it out to the US government through the Cloud Act. If I'm a small bakery or cafe? Meta controls my customers through requiring them to sign up to Instagram before allowing them to see my offerings. My books? Bezos through Amazon uses its algorithms to bury me and both it and Google require expertise in SEO. My reading? Bezos through Amazon owns Goodreads, and Goodreads controls what I see on my feed and which books publicists and publishers are willing to pay to bring my eyeballs to their offerings.

Corporate centralization is so baked into our mindsets that even now, after I took this first big step of migrating my PDS, and began thinking about moving my reading life to an Atmosphere app, I worried about the longevity of that app. What happens if the app goes under? Will I have to go through the onerous process of exporting and losing all my connections again?! Then I figuratively slapped my forehead.

My books; my reading; my book life — it all belongs to me and resides on my personal data server (PDS). All Atmosphere apps do is point to the relevant records on my PDS. If the app goes under, no biggie. If I move to another app, again no biggie. Unlike with Goodreads, where I'll have to export the data and will lose all my followers and following and lose my author profile, moving from one Atmosphere book/reading app to another will require no export and will lose me zip.

That's the freedom the internet offered and Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Google, Microsoft, Elon Musk, Substack, and Apple promptly walled up as they corralled us into their cattle pens. I unwalled my blogs first.

Last week, I migrated my PDS (personal data server) from Bluesky's puffball (what a name for a data centre, eh?) to eurosky.social's data centre in Germany. My online life changed not one whit. My Bluesky experience is exactly the same as before I migrated my PDS comprising my posts, followers, following, likes, saved posts, DMs, and media from under US control to under Europe's privacy laws. I wanted my data to reside under better legal protections. I'm not a criminal, but the bedrock of democracy is anonymity and privacy. Hence, secret ballots and warrants to protect everyone.

When a society allows warrantless searches, it infers we're all criminals, which breeds mistrust and enables authoritarianism.

When a society allows corporations to own our data and imposes a foreign country's privacy laws on them, it controls our politics, news, and how we treat each other.

I used the EU-HAUL page to move my PDS from Bluesky's servers to Eurosky's. I had the instructions open in one window, and the move page on the other, rereading each step carefully before I clicked. Migration took less than 20 minutes. Eurosky's help pages contain easy-to-understand answers on migration.

Because the corporatization mindset grips us strongly, I recommend moving from the closed web to the open web one step, one app, at a time. Next up for me: moving my reading life from Goodreads to probably Book Buzz. And when Gander Social launches interoperability, I'm hoping to merge my Atmosphere PDS with my Gander's PDS. I've not written many original posts on Gander in case I lose them after they launch interoperability. I've mostly reposted my Atmosphere (Bluesky) posts on Gander to guard against loss of my stuff.

The title of this piece is a riff on Tom Flood's Rovelo poster about delivering freedom from space-hogging dangerous drivers. People around the world are putting up his posters and shining his messages on building walls.