We are starting to see for quite some time big tech trying to get the internet under their control. We have seen half of the internet starting to block proxies. Tor is not usable in the normal internet anymore. More and more services require a government issued id for their account.
And now Google went ahead and did the final blow by announcing WEI. If that gets integrated on all popular sites, there will be no more open web. We try to fight back as much as we can, but the bitter truth is most people are already ‘good little pets’ of these giants.
Most of the people, are not just okay, but want these big brothers to handle everything for them. They want to get their finances, entertainment, social medias, government services all done for them by these giants without them even knowing. They are ready to live as big brother says. Half of them already don’t have individual opinions.
Although the fight still continues, It’s time to think about plan B. What if most of internet is blocked for us privacy conscious people? We need alternatives. It’s time to build an ecosystem that we people can use without the help of popular services. There are already a lot of softwares, but we need to fill the gaps fast. We need an open hardware, accessible and a fully open software stack including everyday apps for most of our needs and entertainments. On PC it’s almost there. Mobile terribly lacks in the lowest levels, but have some apps that can help.
PC
For PC, we can still install linux on most devices, so linux. For browsing, we can use firefox or any forks of that. Proton and skiff are good alternatives for basic email, storage etc. For social media we have federated systems like lemmy, services like odysee, mewe etc. Share services that you think should be in this list
Mobile
For mobile, we miss variety in hardware section. One option might be pinephone or other linux phones. Other option might ironically be Pixel. For OS, we can use graph eneOS, cal yx OS, linux based OS etc. But setting it up is currently very hard. For browsing, firefox for android is good (I use it) which also has extensions support. Above mentioned services like proton, skiff, lemmy, odysee, mewe etc. has android apps. For IM we have briar, Session, simpleX etc. Share services that you think should be in this list
Help me document a full recommended ecosystem. Maybe we can have a recommended guide. Maybe there are better options. Discuss.
The enshitification has started right when smartphones came about. I bet most of the these anti-user trends could be traced back to smart phones. and none could have been started on PCs .
Now you can’t even have a bank account if you want to use a privacy respecting device. third parties are dictating what and how to use our own devices. and its is very disgusting that masses have been sleep walking into this just for the meer satisfaction of going viral on tiktok and to have a thousand friends on Facebook and insta0
Oh my friend, I can tell you’re young :)
The shit internet started in the mid 90’s. That’s when the internet became popular and accessible to non-computer-savvy folks. The massive commercialisation of the internet soon ensued, and ads, crappy websites, spam and all the rest soon followed.
Privacy was already dead at the turn of the millenium. Don’t take my word for it: Scott McNealy said it in 1999 and the sumbitch knew what he was talking about.
I’ve known that privacy had gone the way of the dodos since then. That’s 24 years ago. The difference now is that the fascist surveillance capitalism system we live in is now fully in place and the trap is closing on all of us who let it happen.
People are waking up to the fact that they’re in the trap and it’s closing, but I’m pretty sure too late to do anything about it peacefully at this point. It will take a full-blown dystopia for people to revolt and things to change, and it’s not gonna happen tomorrow.
As long as there is a person in the picture, there is a layer, and in that layer is the opportunity space for privacy & separation.
Ultimately, political machines need citizen metadata to justify their propaganda budgets; combined with fascism 1.0 as defined by Mussolini - the integration of state + business (corporations are people?) it makes for a world where whatever bad looks, expect it to get worse. It will be up to the next generation to see the bigger picture.
Sadly, the joke’s on the metadata generation, set theory says* elements in a set can’t influence elements outside of the set, so all this data is…useless.
We’re all human, individuals, if we were better than human we wouldn’t need metadata to understand the human condition. Since we are human, even having that metadata isn’t enough, we can’t change the way we are–we simply can’t know what we are blind to. Each one of us is a small orbit of ideas just outside a box that contains pawns and kings at the end of the game. We’ll always just be human, either laid back and chil, content to live on Mount Vernon in our old age, or Ozymandius.
Which is why most dictators resort to murder, since murder is the simplest part of us, but ultimately, that just leads to future generations reading desert pedestals.
*no it doesn’t, not really
Technically, you can: there are workarounds to use banking apps on rooted mobiles but it’s a bit of work. Or, you can purchase an older pixel and use Graphene