I think a good first step is to use free and open-source, non-profit alternatives (Firefox, Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix, etc). The next is to help grow these technologies by contributing to their development. You can contribute by fixing bugs, translating text, or just donating money.
It will take a while for most people but try to DeGoogle, DeMicrosoft, and DeApple your life. It’s quite liberating to not be tied to any of these company’s DRM, policies or rules.
Use tech and services outside the big tech. Just Fedi over standard social. Use Peertube instead of Youtube.
Run Firefox.
Set up your own servers for yourself or start a community. Matrix, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.
Run SearXNG as your search or help others by hosting.
If you can work of free and open source code that helps decentralize and give the power back to the people or create something new. Even if you can code, learning a project and helping others with it or helping create docs, etc.
Spread the word, but don’t be annoying. Help less technical folks get decentralized.
It’s very difficult and can be disheartening, but you don’t have to cold turkey all of it. Each drip in the bucket helps until we’re all united and become a tidal wave.
When all the power is centralized that’s when those central players think they can do whatever they want.
There’s a lot of good comments and suggestions, but the one that I’m not seeing is, “tell others”.
Do you perform support for friends and family members? Explain why it’s not in their best interest to use Chrome (and Google products in general), then ask and help them to install and use alternatives.
Have a laypersons response to why they should avoid Google for that person you’re chatting with on the bus. Have a response ready to the awful, “but I don’t have anything to hide” counterargument. As an aside, being the tin foil hat wearing guy/gal doesn’t help the cause, explain it in plain language.
“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” ― Edward Snowden
The logical fallacy here being that, based on that context alone, you should care because you will have something to hide in the future. Saying you have nothing to hide is always used in the context of one’s sense of guilt, or lack thereof, based on past actions. A counterargument would then be to ask why you should be allowed to hide your future wrongs.
For many, the subject has nothing to do with that. It’s about not wanting to be monetized without consent. There’s also benefits in the form of protection against identity theft or social engineering. For others, the simple right to fundamental personal privacy itself is important - it’s about not having all of one’s life’s details on public display.
Also known as “none of your goddamn business.”
As a tangent, because it’s now stuck in my head and needs expression - the more thought you give to the problems introduced by technology that blur or step over this line, the more you realize how much harder it’s becoming to prevent outcomes where privacy is lost.
Only engaging AI under tightly controlled circumstances is one thing; having it in the background perceiving everything you say and do on your desktop is a very different conversation. No matter what assurances are given that your privacy is protected, almost every situation like it that’s arisen since the advent of personal computers has resulted in a loss of control through duplicity, intrusion, sabotage, bad design, or floundering integrity.
I always wonder… can a truly open and free new internet be built? What would be the options in doing something like this? Maybe running on existing hardware (fibre, towers etc.) to a certain extent…
Sure, we could do something clever with mesh network access points, or use tunneling (VPN) to build a pocket network on top of the existing Internet (TOR does something generally like this to create a more anonymous Internet). So if this were simply a matter of infrastructure, the tech is already there.
However, there are two problems. The biggest problem is adoption. What service can our little pocket network provide that would convince the lay person to tap into such a network? How are we going to advertise this to others? Even if we had our own copy of the current internet’s infrastructure, we would have a cool webpage and spread by word of mouth and they would still have advertising dollars. Either we need a killer feature (that they can’t simply replicate) or else they’ll just win over the average person by the pillow talk of advertising bucks.
However there’s also a philosophical problem. To create a open internet, it has to be available to everyone and our problem is that includes the asshole corporations we don’t like. The fundamental nature of an internet is to be an interconnected network. By building our own separate network, we’re fundamentally creating a walled garden network, not an open network - it’s essentially defined by who we’re keeping out.
But I’m not going to leave you without a solution. Here’s the framework of what I think we need to do to fix the internet†:
We need to stop treating internet access like a consumer good. It needs to at least be treated as a utility, i.e. as something that has an inherent monopoly and doesn’t self-regulate through the process of supply and demand - there is only one internet, no substitute exists. Heck, I’d argue that internet access should be a human right, a tool that fulfills a basic need for connection and communication.
We need to restore network neutrality, ISPs need to be content neutral, because if they can pick winners and losers, they’ll make private deals and pick the winners that work best for them (often another branch of themselves). Since we lost network neutrality formally in the USA less than a decade ago, the internet still looks kinda mostly open, but it’s eroding slowly.
We need to separate ownership of the physical network equipment from the ownership of the information services. Let’s call these ‘equipment ISPs’ and ‘general access ISPs’. The physical equipment should be owned and maintained by small companies, ideally with about 5-10 field technicians (the physical footprint that covers will vary based on the setting, dense urban settings will need more companies than sparse rural ones). These small equipment ISPs will not be allowed to negotiate directly with the consumer. The Access ISPs will be the ones that will lease an IP address to the general public as well as basic services such as DNS, and will compete on general service quality (up/down/latency speeds) that they’ll have to negotiate with equipment ISPs to ensure quality of service, access ISPs can also sweeten the pot with things like offering an email address or bundling with media services(e.g. Netflix), etc. Equipment ISPs should be expected to have deals with multiple service ISPs, and be prevented from having exclusivity deals. Ultimately, the goal is to allow the general public to have options about which ISP they choose that’s not fundamentally limited by where they are at, and the service ISPs are then on the hook to work with the equipment ISPs to fulfill those promises. Equipment ISPs are being given a small monopoly, but if they perform shoddy there’ll be neighbors on all sides to shame them, also they’ll have to work with at least one or two access ISPs to have any income at all.
Start choosing people over brands. The biggest crime corporations perform against humanity is to take credit for the work that is ultimately done by unique, talented people, then internally treat people as fungible assets that can be let go once they’re not useful. lemmy.world is administrated by @ruud and a small team of admins (check your instance’s sidebar for more details). If @ruud and lemmy.world split and he created a new, different Lemmy instance, I’d follow @ruud to the new insurance because he’s proved his talent at weathering the problems of keeping a service up and running in the modern internet, whereas lemmy.world … is just a domain name. Google wasn’t nearly as evil when it was still run day-to-day by Larry Page & Sergey Brin. Valve rakes in money, but Gabe Newell keeps the company priorities on actually being a good game platform. By contrast Steve Hoffman is hated partially because it often feels his job is to be the face of an otherwise obscure board of directors and he serves them in a way that he doesn’t serve his employees, the moderators, or the users in general.
Overall, that’s four things we can do. None of them are easy. One is on the global level, one on the national level, one on the state or local level, and one on the personal level.
†I live in the USA, so my perspective is through that lens, but I’m trying to offer ideas that should generalize.
Yeah. This project doesn’t go down as far as hardware, but it did take pains to make it as difficult as possible to extend it in bad ways: gemini.circumlunar.space
Thats the neat part, you dont Cause unless they average populace starts caring about an open it will eventually become what Google truly wants, and we are well on our way there
Don’t be greedy if you are a dev or owner of a website, what you make should be always 100% free from ads and trackers. If you are an user dont give away money to this pigs, if you need something don’t rush to amazon but check some local web market first.
Sticking to FOSS and decentralized apps as much as possible. And using less invasive apps like Firefox over chrome. Be willing to jump shit when corporate throws in bullshit if you have to use something closed.
This is the only way to slow the spread of enshittification around the web. It will be less convenient for the end user, but ultimately it’s the only way to stop big companies from fucking the web
It’s not the only way tho. You can also get politically active about it, pressure your representatives into signing legislation in favor of the open web or even join a party or an organization and become the representative yourself and change it from the inside if you can.
Let’s stop pretending individual actions are the only thing we can do to stop corporations, that’s how they win. We need to act politically.
because tech nerds like us that actually know about it and use it are a slim minority.
The only thing thats going to really stop it is fear mongering and the weights of governments. . and we know how much government loves to crack down on trillion dollar businesses /s
@whatisallthis i'm still hopeful for web to stay open, but I forgot there more people who don't care if CompanyABC takes over the web until it affects them personally
I mean yeah I hope the internet always stays open. Just like I hope Sallie Mae helps lower tuition prices and Zillow stops buying and inflating the housing market.
This is the correct answer. All of the replies saying to use Firefox/support FOSS are missing the point. Once Google rolls this out and promotes it as higher security and guaranteed ad impressions, it will become the standard because all of the websites you want to use will opt in. It won’t do you much good to keep using Firefox when your bank, your employer/school, and every news/weather/sports site you try to use require a Google-verified, ad-displaying browser. It’s not our choice to make, and that’s the point of doing it this way.
I’d go one cynical step further to say that once they have complete control over how pages are displayed on your end, they’ll roll out a subscription for ad-free* browsing, which will eventually include ads anyway a couple years down the road.
I’d just try to spend as little time as possible on websites that require using Chrome. Probably would be plenty of sites resistant to implementing it (at least those worth visiting). I wonder if Gemini protocol would get a boost in popularity.
Twice in the past few months I came across a site that would not work with Firefox. The other time it actually did work, but said that it recommends chrome to function properly.
The first one was a local government form that would not let me select boxes, but chrome worked without any problems.
The second was some 3d game or something like that.
Could you maybe still go back and find those links? I use FF for well over 10 years now. And I would say, the amount of websites that do not work, are less than one a year. The only reason are really bleeding edge css filter or MediaDevice instantiations (Webcam, etc.). Video, JS, and HTML is nearly Browser agnostic by this time. I would love to see those non working firefox websites everybody always talks about.
They actively prohibit to use their website with FF. When I look at it in Chromium (only Chrome and Chromium are allowed. No Edge, No Safari, …) I can not see anything why it should not work. Drag and Drop an Image into a dropzone.js container is no crazy technology. Imgur does it every day.
Do you know why they think it would not work in FF? It is just a translation service. I think this is not a good example, as it more seems like they do not want to support webkit and optimized it only for chrome, but their product does not seems to crazy for FF.
They also have Google Drive files connections. Maybe they have just bundled their product the the google ecosystem and therefore prohibit FF/Safari/etc. But this is not the problem of FF/Safari/etc., they just decided to offer a google product only on google browser.
(I would not support such a vendor lock-in, but that is just my 2 cents)
I 💯 agree and I don’t like it either (I use Firefox as my daily driver). However I occasionally work as a translator and the competing CATs are inferior. So I have installed Chromium just for this one website.
The second one that recommended chrome, I honestly can’t even really remember what it was.
The local government one is local to just a few city blocks, so I’m not going to share it. But the only thing that didn’t work was when I input my city for example, the next box to select the street did not activate. When I clicked on it no streets were listed. Just a single empty box appeared.
When I did it in chrome I listed my city and then the next box populated with the streets.
I’m not sure if this makes sense, I’m from but not in the US and I’m trying to write about it in a way that makes sense.
Brave IS chrome. Same engine and shit. We need to eliminate the one engine monopoly. Very few people know the actual value of Firefox’s existence. It does suck at times. It’s not the greatest browser out there, but it NEED to keep existing if we want to save the web from Google’s Monopoly
I mean just for instances when a page does not work with Firefox.
Like I legit needed to fill out then government form, I don’t know what to tell you. I use Firefox all the time, but the site legit wasn’t working. I can’t skip out on the form and then just tell them, if it didn’t work on Firefox.
That’s understandable. It’s not a crime to use chrome when you have to. Shit happens, but as long as you’re aware of the importance of Firefox, you’re good. I use brave and Vivaldi all the time on certain things, but my main browser for everything else is Firefox.
I know microsoft is not loved by anyone, but this is why I was so furious when they caved and switched Edge to Chromium… Especially since they caved because Google literally abused their position to intentionally and maliciously degrade performance on Edge.
Cause I’d rather have Microsoft/IE/Edge still out there sucking up % away from Chromium, than them ceeding their land and territory to google.
Biggest issue i’ve had is AMDRewards site not working on firefox. AMD just ignores the issue and treats it like its a bad redeem code issue, no matter how many times I’ve laid it out for them.
So 3 fucking times I’ve had to install the linux version of Edge, to redeem the code, and download the PVT, just to get my shit. (and immediately uninstall edge afterwards).
I miss the fucking days when they just put the cdkey in the box, and didnt treat me like a thieving piece of shit that had to go through 5 different hoops to prove to them I’m not.
This is one of the reasons to use FF. I know it can be a bit inconvenient, but these sites don’t care about optimizing for anything but Chrome because it has such a huge market share.
And you can keep a second browser installed for the few times this happens, e.g. Chromium or Brave. Also an addon to change your user-agent string for a website works 90% of the time.
If it’s a random site, then fuck it, I’ll just not visit it again. That’s their issue, not mine. If it is something important, I’d try changing the user agent. That works most of the time.
I feel the same way you do. I’ll try the user agent thing next time. I’m totally all in on Firefox and well safari on iOS, but if they ever allow it to be changed, I’ll be Firefox all the way.
I just want remind everyone that Windows 11 requires your computer to ship with TPM2.0 enabled. This will complete the circuit meaning remote streaming websites can ensure you don’t have DRM on your machine.
TPM is a security token loaded into the firmware of the BIOS put in by the manufacturer to ensure you haven’t tampered with the operating system as shipped and controlled by them.
Conspiratorial but has a string of possibility. Note that Microsoft itself has a solution to workaround the TPM 2.0 needs on their forums, so Windows definitely is not going DRM kiosk mode on internet browsing this early.
Microsoft and Motherboard manufacturers: Putting DRM chips on the motherboard.
User: Why?
Microsoft: No reason.
User: Most businesses would switch to a cheaper toilet paper to save $5, why are you shipping chips and developing software and technology to use these chips.
Microsoft: Oh we’re not going to force anyone to do anything, we just want the ability to. Look at this workaround that we expect 0.015 of our billions of Windows users to use.
It’s a big threat because once it’s easy to block unapproved browsers, lots of people will do it. Yeah, there will always be a few weirdos like us that don’t enable it, but just imagine when it’s your bank, your insurance company, your government, and most every linked-to page on Lemmy. You’ll be forced to use Chrome to interact with large parts of the internet then.
I’m banking (ha) that most web dev is lazy and won’t change shit that isn’t broken. It’ll be YouTube mainly since Google hasn’t figured out how to stop uBlockO.
Most other websites are probably not worth it and the Internet is designed day one to route around damage. A whole bunch of Blogspam SEO sites banning Firefox is a win.
Otherwise they’re be a addon extensions for Firefox developed in a week probably to “fake” it.
I wouldn’t count on that. Web devs aren’t going to push for this, it’ll be the suits that have some dumb automated “security” tool tell them they need to enable it or they’ll get hacked.
There will always be a cat and mouse game where some people figure out clever ways around this, but I wouldn’t count on it being as easy as installing an addon. Sites could start requiring a specific attester that requires that you run their rootkit malware to spy on your entire OS and only supports a few popular OSes. Thanks to projects like TPM, your own hardware could be working against you.
Exactly right, gonna be some big corpo push that it has to get done because “1% of our userbase is getting around the ads, that’s 1% of our profit we need!!”. And as a web dev, sure I could say I refuse. and then get demoted, fired, and they’ll get someone else to do it anyway.
The saving grace is that this will be expensive to do, and Google has proven time and time again that their tech isn’t trustworthy or long-term to most companies. If this does get through, that’s how I’d pitch it to my company. Google gets ideas, gets bored of them, throws them away or changes them so drastically that we have to redo all the work anyway, so it’s not worth doing any time soon. A great case of this is AMP, and while there are some pages that did switch to AMP, the vast majority of sites didn’t bother with it. Not worth the investment. Granted this is different because its ads, and we should by no means rely on this and give up the fight.
First line in the sand is to say this goes against the web’s foundations directly and that Google is actively trying to monopolize the internet.
That’s a great way to push back internally. "Oh you know Google, always killing things. Why should we waste the effort? This’ll just end up on killedbygoogle.com"
That’s how I’d approach it. All of their programs are just hell to maintain, and one that actively blocks users will be worse. Even simple things like Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics for some reason still need someone touching the code at least once a year
I guess, but somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of people already use ad blockers. It’s not a small segment of the population. Even more people use some sort of plugin.
I think it is more likely that certain sites require secure mode; just like today. I guess I could be wrong, and most sites will end up doing it. I still suspect there will be a work around; even if it is as complicated as a secure browser being run in a virtual machine and then AI removing the ads to show you the ‘clean’ version.
DRM is already applied for certain content in websites such as Netflix, etc, and it makes it waaaay harder to bypass.
For example, Netflix (and the others) use DRM to block Linux computers from higher quality content. Why? I guess “hackers” and “think of the children”. Truth is… content is already pirated from the second it gets released on any of these platforms… so they are not really fixing anything… I guess they really want you to use a tracking OS.
Imagine this kind of system but for an entire website. Big companies imposing their devices and software as the only way to access a website… which is really just HTML and Javascript files, entirely platform agnostic… but who cares? They are struggling for money so they are squeezing every little possibility.
Amazon too, Went freaking nuts trying to figure out why I couldnt watch any of my shit above like 180p quality on amazon. until I found out they intentionally and maliciously degrade the quality on non-windows machines.
I was trying to convey that there is no right or wrong answer to which distro to choose, but some distros are more advances than others, so if the most applicable distro is selected it should be fine. But I get what you’re saying.
Agreed but you do need to be willing to tinker a bit. Even ubuntu required a lot of tinkering to get working on my system. I’m all for getting people to switch, and it’s much easier than it was 15 years ago when I started, but for most people they’re not going to just install linux. We definitely are in the <1% of users.
If you have bleeding edge hardware, that can be a problem from time to time, but if I’m being honest, I haven’t seen any real issues since the early 00’s needed tweaking to work. To suggest that Windows is tweak free is disingenuous, and Apple is a walled garden that is designed to ‘just work’ but Apple expects their users to just buy a new device when something becomes mildly inconvenient to them.
Yeah, but you can’t tell me that the levels of tweaking are the same.
For example. I have never had to go in and modify conf files for nvidia drivers on Windows to be able to run basic games. My ubuntu install? Definitely had to.
Well, it all comes down to tastes and preferences, but Linux Mint is made to be a very easy transition for (ex-)Windows users. It works out of the box, looks intuitive and has great support on their forums. Give it a try and if you feel like you want to try out other distros later, it all gets easier once you are familiar with Linux overall.
And yes, what you mean is dual booting and Mint asks you on install if you want to choose that option and sets everything up for you.
IME, big momentous events are actually continuous transitions that we only notice in a drastic moment.
This whole chrome thing has been building to this for ages. So beyond using Firefox, there’s also some basic principles that need to be formulated and distributed as “it’s free because you’re the product” is now … not to mention breaking up monopolies.
They also have ProtonDrive as an alternative to Google Drive. Apple’s iCloud is also end-to-end encrypted now. pCloud is another popular option. There are a number of choices for secure cloud storage these days.
Web search is a bit more difficult. DuckDuckGo is heavily integrated with Bing. Brave Search is hit-or-miss. Yahoo is just a front-end for Bing.
If you need live document collaboration, you’re probably already in a setting where either Sharepoint or GSuite are mandated. If you’re not, BitAI may be worth looking into.
All great advice, but I personally cannot urge people towards pCloud. I have one of the permanent tiers, but I found the service frustratingly buggy and, when contacted, support was rude and unhelpful. There are so many little odd limitations on the pCloud file system it was frustrating. I also worry that their buy-once business model is not sustainable.
Sync.com provides an even more secure service (zero-knowledge across the board) with similar (better than US anyway) privacy protections in the host country (Canada) that has been, so far for 2 years of use, rock solid (I couldn’t go a week without pCloud farting out some error). The subscription model is affordable and generous and the customer-facing pages for sharing files are very professional looking (important to me, because I professionally share files and pCloud looked like a hobbyist page in this regard AND leaked private information).
EDIT: Regarding iCloud. Not only is iCloud end-to-end, but you may turn on zero-knowledge encryption now, as well (Advanced Data Protection I think is what they call it) so that Apple doesn’t even have the keys to decrypt your data, making it quite similar to sync.com now.
Swiss technology company that focuses on privacy products. Initially funded by a Swiss startup capital firm and now uses a subscription model. ProtonMail is not open source or non-profit, but the product they offer is privacy. Switzerland also has strict privacy laws and resists state-based information requests. Best option is to run one’s own email client server, but simple folks like me don’t have the skills to do so. (FWIW, I use ProtonMail and think it works great.)
Alphabet needs to be broken up, same as Microsoft and Apple and Amazon. The consolidation of tech into a few giant corporations that have a tremendous amount of power and hold a monopoly/duopoly is doing a lot of harm.
Not that I like Verizon and Comcast but they are only regional problems. They don’t operate everywhere in the world.
In many countries, a lot of large ISPs are the inheritors of national monopolies and are not overly interested in global domination. They are shit, yes, but at a smaller scale. In this regard, they don’t really pose as a threat to the idea of open internet.
Of course the US ISPs have a special place in the system and shouldn’t completely be forgotten but they are very far from the global domination of Google et al.
That’s why we need to take matters into our own hands and refuse to use their services and support FOSS with all our efforts. The government ain’t gonna do shit, this is a DIY project to save the open internet.
Activism exists for a reason. This isn’t a DIY project, this is one that needs people to be more vocal and active so that governments do something about it.
The EU didn’t start regulating apple & co because it woke up one day and felt like doing it, it did so because activists and people pressured them to do so or joined the world of politics to fix these issues.
The solution isn’t to tackle it individually, that’s how the corporations win, it’s to get politically involved in whichever way we can and want to and tackle it as a group.
I’m not saying to tackle it individually, I’m saying to tackle it independently. As in independent groups that are not part of any government or corporation.
Any type of activism which is enacted through the channels of government and/or business is inherently meaningless in the grand scheme. You can move a few pieces around the board and get a small concession, but the wealthy will always find a way to outmanuever and come out on top. The game is rigged, and the fact that most well meaning people spend all of their activist energy playing into this rigged game is a tremendous waste.
It’s necessary to quit the game entirely and start a new game. Which entails sustainable, self-sufficient, non-capitalist communities and structures. Eventually political interaction with established power structures will be necessary, but right now the average person has zero leverage. In order to have leverage, you need to not be working for the people you are trying to negotiate with, no?
The problem with activism is that it puts duct tape over leaking pipes, but never goes down to the basement and turns off the water pressure. It’s a mental treadmill that drains revolutionary energy from people without producing meaningful change.
Don’t get me wrong, you should definitely advocate for institutions to be better, it’s a net positive (probably). But my point is that this whole paradigm needs to be disrupted, and activism is like mental masturbation for those who claim to want real change, but are uncomfortable with the drastic actions necessary to enact such change.
Is it necessary for the government to break up Reddit in order for Lemmy to succeed? I don’t believe so, and even if I did, I don’t believe they actually will. Instead of spending our whole lives praying for the government to save us from reddit, we are doing it ourselves.
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