Things I want to let go of

In no particular order.

• Listening to podcasts. I'm very fond of podcasts. Having something interesting to listen to all the time has gotten me to walk more, do more dishes, and enjoy an otherwise bad commute (remember those?) Plus, like any new medium, it feels like a close community: there are so many creators I feel very close to. Many years in, however, the downsides are very clear: constant craving for novelty and entertainment, mindlessness, reluctance to connect to people nearby (the few people who are not wearing headphones anyway.) I want to see what the other side is like. Maybe I'm missing out on something. Maybe not.
• The cloud. This one has been a long time coming. I've been overly reliant on other people's computers. I don't care for video entertainment, so Netflix has never appealed to me, but getting DRM on all my music collection was not a good move. I'm beginning to self-host most of the services I rely on, running from my Synology NAS and Raspberry Pis. I love my Kindle as a device, but the DRM aspect bugs me. ~~I'm on the lookout for a good e-ink device with good support for open formats.~~ I'm now the owner of an Eink tablet with DRM-free epub support.
• My phone. I notice I barely use it to talk to people anymore: only bots.
• Closed-source software. Plenty has been written about this. This has the fortunate side-effect of ruling out most phone apps and SaSS (service as a software substitute.)
• The web. It's beyond repair at this point. There's long been purists talking about "saving the open web", but that ship has sailed. Web apps are bad many times over, since they use proprietary JavaScript, require internet connectivity, and remove control from the users. Gopher and Gemini seem promising, but I admit I'm very ignorant here.