These are my priorities when it comes to unwebbing.

1. When dealing with companies:

   i. Prefer Canadian companies. I'm not hardcore anticapitalist, but if I'm going to give money to sonuvabitch corporations, I want them to be our sonuvabitch corporations, even if this is somewhat illusory.

   ii. Alternatively, prefer EU companies. Better anti-trust, privacy, and intellectual property laws in general.

   iii. If I have to deal with a USA based company, the smaller the better. Sure, maybe today's plucky independent startup is tomorrow's Google, but that's tomorrow's problem.

   iv. Avoid Russia, China, darkweb, etc. entirely. Not going crazy with this.

2. Prefer open source solutions, but it's OK to pay for something if there is good value.

   i. Somewhere along the way, the internet trained us that the important shit should be free (email, search, file sharing) but we should choke down ads and sell our souls/data in exchange. We pay to stream dumb TV shows and we can subscribe to monthly delivery of socks and underwear, we can afford to actually pay for those things we rely on every day.

   ii. (Of course, not everyone is in the same financial situation. Luckily for those in financial need, there usually is a free, private, open source solution, it just may be less convenient and require more self-learning than is ideal.)

3. Privacy: Nice to have, but I'm not sweaty about it.

   i. Your mileage will obviously vary here, depending on your life details. I live a fortunate life, where I am pretty much a default NPC causing trouble for nobody (even if they deserve some trouble).

   ii. That said, I think targeted advertising is a psychic drain on our wellbeing, and I am philosophically, ethically, and legally opposed to the practice of software companies scraping my data to train LLMs.

4. Avoid, within reason, "ecosystems": when one company provides everything you would ever need, especially when these would otherwise be orthogonal services.

   i. This is a tricky one. Ecosystems are convenient. This is how Google and Apple took over everyone's life.

   ii. But this is why it's so hard to extract yourself when you decide later on that you don't like them anymore. We want to make life easy for our future selves who will change our minds.

5. The aim is eventual self-hosting, within reason. Email? Nah. Media? Sure.