I speak in praise of “disintermediation”. In the spirit of DIY, it’s now quite realistic and inexpensive to host virtually any kind of internet service for oneself, if one is willing to learn how (and “just Ducking it” helps tremendously). After overcoming a learning curve at first, in the longer term, it pays off, as life becomes much more disentangled that way.

This website is an example of such “disintermediation”, and disentangling. For example, note how by Hosting It Myself, this website is a lot less complicated because it doesn’t need to hassle you about things like:

  • needing to be OK with the Cookies which I have no choice but to shove down your Web Browser’s throat, for no discernible benefit of any kind to you.
  • turning your Ad blocker off, as there are no ads here.
  • joining a mailing list. That’s what an RSS feed is for.
  • allowing “Notifications” in your Web Browser. Again, that’s what an RSS feed is for.

You’d be surprised what $10/US a month will buy one in the way of Web hosting. That’s what it costs me to host this site, including posting my occasional photo collections nicely on a separate Nextcloud server.

A lot of the Internet’s problems go away, if people learn how to host things for themselves, as well as simply subscribe to the RSS feeds of people and organizations (on totally different hosting platforms) that they want to follow.

Please work up the courage to empower yourselves, and don’t let the bullies of the world host things for you, at an unreasonably high cost of being exploited in various ways for that privilege.

You might wonder what business a Buddhist monk has, advocating how people should or should not use technology. As a Buddhist monk, I am in the business of advocating people’s mental and spiritual health. And I say that it’s well worth $10/month to avoid a whole bunch of shady, creepy technologies and currently-popular internet platforms, in the interests of safeguarding our collective mental and spiritual health.