Added an alternative platforms blog post (draft)

content/blog/altplatforms.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+---
+title: "Alternative platforms and why you should consider them"
+description: Let's take back our internet from the Silicon Valley overlords!
+thumbnail: "/blog/img/altplatforms.png"
+date: 2022-11-06T20:31:34+01:00
+tags: ["selfhosting", "free software", "bloat"]
+draft: true
+---
+
+Most people nowadays have a very limited view of the internet: they just watch content like posts, photos and videos from the same 5 or 6 social networks owned by a few corporations who filter the content to make people spend even more time on these sites, making them believe what they want you to believe and bombarding you with ads tailored to every single activity of yours, even on other websites, holding entire monopolies on the tech industry and the flow of information. Instant messaging happens all on either SMS or WhatsApp (more rarely on Telegram and Signal) which have extreme privacy issues, more specifically the first one for being an ancient unencrypted protocol and the second being yet another data honeypot for Meta.
+
+But the internet has not always been like this, the good old internet (I'd say from the very early days up to the mid 2000's) was much different: everyone had their own website, all with a unique look and feel, style of content and complete freedom, but even with the rise of the early social networks and video sharing platforms like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, there was so much more soul and uniqueness to what people uploaded on such sites. When it comes to messaging there were several options, such as email, BBS and IRC, which were (and still are) decentralized, interoperable and not under control of one entity, although that's also when early proprietary IM platforms such as AOL, MSN Messenger and Google Talk were created, and all of these protocols and platforms weren't exactly private since back then there was no real concept of online privacy.
+
+![An oldschool site (wac.neocities.org), HexChat and Outlook Express 6](/blog/img/webircemail.png)
+
+Clearly the internet has evolved bringing us lots of interactivity and information, speedier and more accurately than ever, but the drawbacks of the gradual corporate takeover of the web, along with the fact that people nowadays are so illiterate about computing in general that [the youngest ones don't even know what files and folders are](https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z), that has happened in the last few decades are enough for me to say that we should stop for a moment and look back at what we've lost, so that we can take those old concepts to rebase, or in some cases even replace, what we dislike about the modern web in order to improve it.