By Jack Published on October 24, 2025

Stop Renting Your Digital Life: Three Tools to Claim Your Own Corner of the Internet

TL;DR: You can build a fast, secure website, chat privately, and use social media without giant corporations watching every single move you make.

Let’s Dig In

You’re not really a customer of the major online platforms; you’re just a tenant. They charge you with your attention, track your activity like a landlord, and change the rules on a whim. The fix isn’t to be a coding genius, it’s to switch out the parts of your online life that are built for surveillance with ones that are built for control.

1. Your Website: The Pre-Built House (Publii)

Most websites are like a fast-food kitchen: Every time a visitor shows up, the waiter (the server) has to run to the back, talk to the cook (the database), assemble the food (the page code), and then deliver it. This makes the whole operation slow, heavy, and leaves a lot of doors for troublemakers (hackers) to get in.

Publii changes this. It’s a simple app on your own computer where you pre-bake the entire cake—the finished website—before anyone even orders. When you’re ready, you click a button, and the app uploads only the ready-made slices (the finished, lightweight files) to your cheap web host.

The result is a site that loads lightning-fast because there’s no complicated database or code to wrestle with on the server. It’s also incredibly secure because the server is serving static, unchanging files instead of running a complex engine that can be attacked. You write offline, keep control locally, and only upload the final product.

2. Private Chat: The Direct Line (Jami)

When you use the big messaging apps, your texts, calls, and files usually have to go through one company’s massive central switchboard first. That switchboard sees all the traffic and is the single biggest target for data theft.

Jami skips the switchboard entirely. It’s designed for direct, device-to-device communication. Think of it like walking from your house straight to your friend’s house instead of always having to go through a central post office.

This cuts out the middleman. No central server means no company watching the traffic, no billionaire spying model, and no targeted ads based on your conversations. Your contact list and chat history are locked down on your device, not floating on some corporate cloud.

Traditional social media is a single, centralized TV channel. One CEO or corporate board decides what gets shown, and the algorithm is the director, manipulating the programming to keep you scrolling.

Mastodon is a network of thousands of small, independent towns (servers) that all agree to talk to each other. It works like email: You can have an account on a GMail server, your friend can have one from their local university, and you can still send messages back and forth.

You pick a “neighborhood” (a server) that fits your interests. You can still follow and talk to people on any other Mastodon server. Your feed is chronological—you see posts from the people you follow, in the order they posted them—without a corporation’s algorithm deciding what you need to see next. If you don’t like the rules of your current “town,” you pack up and move to a new one without losing access to the rest of the network. It’s a social network where the community sets the rules.