Decentralising My Digital Self: A Personal Manifesto

The internet promised connection, but somewhere along the way social platforms morphed from playgrounds into panopticons, each update eroding a bit more of our digital autonomy and edging closer towards total enshittification.

This personal digital space you're on right now isn’t optimised for virality or SEO. Instead of chasing likes, I’m chasing resonance. If something feels “on-brand,” that’s usually a sign I’ve over-filtered the humanity out of it.

My practice is simple, almost embarrassingly so. Each day, I try and collect a scrap of life – a photo, a scribbled note, a book passage that made me pause. Then, at the month’s end, these fragments become a digital scrapbook. It’s messy, often incomplete, and utterly freeing. No pressure to post daily, no anxiety about engagement metrics. Just the quiet joy of documenting life as it actually unfolds.

The question of whether anyone will ever see any of this isn't really relevant. Reach isn’t the point. Quality of expression is.

This site is a little stake in the gorund. A small call for mindful digital homesteading. For carving out a space, however small, that’s truly mine. Somewhere a bit ugly, a bit unfinished. But mine.

The beauty of a decentralised approach is that there’s no one right answer. My digital practice will look different from yours, as it should. The core question is this: Am I building a space that will still feel true to me five years from now? Or am I just feeding someone else’s algorithm?

Every time I resist the urge to polish my online self into a performative caricature, I'm engaged in a small act of digital disobedience. It might not change the world, but I genuinely believe it can change how I see myself in it.