Reject online services, embrace your own platform

For a long time I've thought about making a website but never got the incentive to actually make one. This lack of interest stemmed from the fact that I always thought that building and maintaining a website was a very complex process, also, I always had the illusion that social media was a superior alternative compared to owning a website. But ever since I got banned from social media without even understanding the reason why, I've realized that social media ain't a good option and it's more a liability. From that point on, I decided to actually build my website and put some actual work into it.

As my final verdict, I must say that this has been one of the best decisions I've ever made, not only it allowed me to create my own "platform" however I wanted to post whatever I so please, but it also allowed me to make sure my unintended information and metadata doesn't get easily harvested by any evil corporation.

It's actually not that hard to own a website and it's actually dirt cheap, with around 2€/$ you can get away with a domain name for an entire year, and with around 5€/$ a month, you can rent a VPS where you can host all the services you want.

Currently my VPS is hosting my own website, my search engine, my chat server, my email server and my git server.

As for what I use, for my DNS domain name provider I used namecheap, and for my VPS provider I used Vultr.

*Note: If you wish to use Vultr as a VPS provider and plan to host an email server on it, you have to open up a ticket in Vultr's support to unblock port 25(smtp).*

In conclusion

I totally recommend everyone to ditch their social media apps and creating their own website. It's way more privacy sensible and you don't have to abide by any TOS since you are the service owner.