About

Desubscribe is my hope for a world where good technology is used for good. Where people treat others with empathy, and products are built with humans in mind and not dollar signs. We cover everything Trust & Safety, Privacy, AI, Security, Product, Selfhosting, and a sprinkle of other things in between.

Your blog is called desubscribe... but it has a subscription?

Check out our foundational post! Desubscribe does not mean "don't subscribe to anything". Desubscribe is the belief to intentionally take time to evaluate your subscriptions and remove what can doesn't give you value. If you have the money to give and you want to support our work, please see Why Crypto / Matrix Only for more.

How do I get notified of posts?

You can do two methods:

• Import desub's RSS into your favorite RSS reader. Since this is likely happening asynchronously - we recommend using a RSS over Tor reader / proxy
• Subscribe using the subscription button in the bottom right. To subscribe, you need a Matrix account.
  

Donations & Subscriptions

All transactions with Desubscribe are donations. You should not expect to receive anything in return - even cosmetic. Donations purely help us to bring quality content to you.

How to Donate / Subscribe

Donate here via Monero. Payments are handled entirely through my selfhosted instance of BTCPayServer. See Why Crypto / Matrix Only for more info.

Monetary transparency

I do not want donations unless you can easily afford it. While many sites keep their revenue private, I find this eventually lowers the quality of the content. Creators feel the need to project an aura of either poverty or opulence as they grow. Take a look at the chart below to see Desubscribe's current funding and spends, and what we hope to do with more money in the future.

Sponsorships

We may at time receive products or software for free as part of an evaluation of a paid product. Any discounted product for Desubscribe will be clearly identified.

If an organization wishes to have an expedited or timed publication - they may donate to one of the following charities or a competitor open source project on behalf of Desubscribe and their organization:

• Transgender Law Center
• ACLU

At no point will Desubscribe concede editorial control for a product or service.

Why Crypto / Matrix only

Trust needs to opinionated - If Desubscribe was not meant to be linked to my personal identity, I would be having it hosted as a tor hidden service with only instructions on how to access using a tor reverse proxy.

Part of opinionated trust is determining the tradeoff between privacy and usability for your end users. Trust by design means that you need to layer in privacy, safety, and security for your users, rather on relying on themselves to do so.

I do not want to know who you are. Period, point blank, and so forth. The less I know about you, the less we both need to worry. I accept that I will have less donors and less subscribers in exchange for having less issues.

Crypto and federation are not the future. Too many corporate interests make these technologies impractical at a larger scale. Any attempts to moderate these technologies on a large scale inevitably lead to a significantly less efficient centralized system. That being said:

I only use matrix for outbound notifications / communication for the following reasons:

• I get a non-desub managed identity platform to securely verify and notify users on.
• I get a desub managed chat platform connected to said identity platform to use for communication.

I only accept cryptocurrency for the following reasons:

• Monero forces privacy for all its users. Even if you do not set up a hot wallet, I will not know anything about any of your other transactions. You won't know about mine.
• We employ strict upfront security for Desubscribe; we do not accept donations >$200 at a time without prior contact; we do not have any subscriptions except our $5 monthly one. Refunds are unlikely
• We do not need to comply with any KYC requirements as you do not get anything for donations.
• I do not need to rely on any third parties. I do not need any data.

AI guidelines

Generative AI is theft. Pointblank. Companies scrape their users information and use it to create models that go to the public without explicit consent. Large AI providers do it to anyone on the internet without any consent. Moreover, GenAI is expensive theft. The energy costs of usage are significantly higher than other means of similar work. Until there is a breakthrough that allows for low power on-device models, AI sits in the same category as crypto for me.

I still use GenAI for certain tasks. I do not have artistic ability, nor the means to hire an artist. Free stock photos as this point does not actually guarantee I will be AI free. Similarly, LLMs provide me an affordable way to copyedit my work. I have funding goals that will allow me to pay for imagery and copyeditng. Please see Monetary Transparency for more info.