I am fucking scared of the mass surveilence nightmare direction that the internet and the world as a whole is going towards… C2PA, france hacking itself into citizen phones, the UK anti encryption law, EU’s chat control, etc. Im also sick of and hate the “you will own nothing and be happy” mentality that corpos try to push. I dont wanna know how the world will look like in 5-10 years.
Yeah, it’s incredibly hard to be optimistic about how things are going. Tech used to be one of those things that made me excited about things to come and look forward to the future, but now (with rich AI tech bros ripping off artists and creatives, proof of work harming the environment, people owning and controlling less and less, etc.) it just feels like so many things are pushing us in a bad direction.
On the bright side, things like Linux, FOSS and the Fediverse are examples of good tech, and at least the potential for a future where the people have some agency and ownership over the digital world. I hope that we can continue to grow software in an open and community-based direction, if only so that the niche of geeks who care about computers and the internet can have some way of fighting back against ever-growing tech conglomerates.
New place for people created
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Almost no moderation, real freedom
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It becomes mainstream
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Corporations take over
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Make as much profit as possible
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The place loses its initial charmThat’s the cycle more or less. You can apply it to internet or to other things. You can look at the privacy aspect, at the freedom or any other.
The internet was taken over by gigant corporations and had it’s former soul sucked out of it.
VR Chat is still a place without that much moderation or corporate control. I wouldn’t say it’s mainstream but facebook already tried taking over that space.
You can even find this in real places like America.
People who could get there were free, could start a new life. Then the USA became just another country with (not a corporation but) a government there to “moderate” people and spy on them and eventually become a global superpower.That’s all i had to say. I know it’s slightly off topic but i really think its important. This is the video that made me think about all of this https://youtu.be/4PHT-zBxKQQ
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/4PHT-zBxKQQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I love how vrchat is so much of a freak show (and I love it for that) that corpos are too scared to even acknowledge its existence. Dunno if you’ve noticed, but whenever a company talks about “the metaverse” they tend to mention all the mainstream social programs except vrchat, despite vrchat being one of the largest. Vrchat seems like it’s too gay, trans, furry, weaboo, autistic and neurodivergent for corporations to be able to apply their normal methods of sanitation and control to it.
AI has entered the chat
Honestly it’s one of my personal reasons for disliking AI. I (let alone most of our kids) don’t want or need a reason to think less, let alone own less of my content. FFS.
Combine this with laboratories learning how to literally control pathogens and we could have the distophia of the future
I feel like I’ve explored very deep edges of sound alternatives. I’ve tried replacing my phone with consumer friendly alternatives and they just weren’t as good unless you can get a fair phone in the US which is hit or miss. The Internet itself lending itself to subscription based models is because servers and data storage costs money.
I hate to say it, but even if you remove power through solar investments and using lightweight servers you still have ISP to pay. Everyone’s got bills and overhead, because nothing is free.
My advice is to ground your logic in that everything requires resources to run and rejoice in community wins like Lemmy or mastodon or Graphene OS. It’s not all bad. Find the good in the bad and move towards what works for you personally. I’ve been off of windows for like a year now and I think that alone is impressive despite Xbox for example costing an arm and a leg.
The internet as we knew it was based on something that doesn’t exist anymore.
Back in the '90s the internet was a million small companies all posturing and juggling for position. The great late capitalism push means that everybody needs to make 20% more every year which is completely possible to do when you’re tiny.
The advertising fire hose back then was enough to expand small companies year-over-year. The return on investments from some well placed static ads, and then later on YouTube ads was more than enough to oil the gears of commerce.
Now the only thing that’s left are the mega corporations, They can’t sustainably expand at 20% per year, but they sure do like to buy up those tiny corporations.
Advertising is no longer sufficient, so subscriptions are going to creep in. At some point subscriptions will no longer be sufficient.
Nothing was ever free, we were the product. In the current economic situation we’re no longer as profitable a product. Interest rates exist again venture capital is drying up.
At some point everything we use that’s not private community funded is going to end up being paid for by both a subscription and advertising
I was honestly kind of hoping more web 3 peer-to-peer stuff would be the final answer but all those projects seems to be fizzling out.
Yeah agreed. I’m working on a solution but it’s going to cost the consumer. According to Zuckerberg the first sin of the Internet was making everything free. If you’re doing things in the dapp space it’s harder since every person needs a server not just an app in an ideal world.
These monolithic websites have a lot less of an excuse imo since they run on a shared server though.
He’s kind of right in a way. If advertising is your model, you can never get bigger than the collective sum of your advertisers. That’s scales well until you are one of the biggest companies in the world, and then there just aren’t new sources of advertising dollars to build on. You need other monetization channels, and those can frequently be in conflict with the advertising mission.
A subscription based service, in theory, directly converts your specific utility as a good or service into cash flow, rather than the utility of the service for pushing ad impressions.
This is the rub though - so many people think that there is a giant conspiracy to make tech conform to some nefarious capitalism endgame, but in a lot of cases, this shit is legitimately just consumer preference.
Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of kleptocratic fuckery afoot as well, but there are also plenty of examples of consumers wanting something that actual experts think is dumb or unsafe.
It is an absolute nightmare, but you can gain some privacy back with ublock origin, an adblocking DNS on your phone, Firefox, a VPN, and ditching all things google/meta. As I type this out, I am reminded how much effort it takes to claw back your privacy…yeah OP, I’m with you, the modern internet is a profit-at-all-cost cesspool that can eat a moldy potato!
For mobile adblockers I recommend AdAway: https://github.com/AdAway/AdAway
Sweet! Just installed. How does it compare to adguard?
It redirects Ad servers to the 127.0.0.1 ip (loopback adress) or blocks them from connecting to your device
Firefox mobile now supports extensions like uBlock Origin, although that only works for the web and not the whole phone.
I’m down to using Facebook in Firefox again. And reddit very occasionally too. Gostery,AdBlock, privacy possum, so many addons available for Firefox.
Ditching google is the most difficult part, especially when iPhone is so locked down :(
How so? You can just use an iPhone without running any Google apps on it, right?
I’ve primarily been an iphone user over the years and was recently hand me downed an older pixel. Using grapheneOS and firefox, I was surprised to see there were only about a dozen extensions available, good ones, but not all of them like I’d assumed. Then I discovered chrome on android has zero, is that right? I cannot believe that there are so many people that use a mobile browser without an adblocker. On iOS safari, I have dozens of incredible extensions (basically countless through the app store) that make the internet useable again. I’m happy to see safari opening up.
You can get any extensions you want on Android with Firefox Beta (or Nightly) by creating a custom collection at addons.mozilla.org
Firefox on mobile has piles of apps generally now. No need for a list or nightly or beta.
There’s only a subset of addons available normally, this method lets you make any addons you want available on Android. This is what I’m referring to: https://www.androidpolice.com/install-add-on-extension-mozilla-firefox-android/
What?! I was under the impression that ad blocking is still impossible in iOS. What extensions do you use? I didn’t see uBlock origin in there.
Vinegar - $2 - Adblock for youtube, PiP, and enables background audio. In tandem with sponsorblock is absolutely stellar (in safari only, not the youtube app).
SponsorBlock - $3 - Removes sponsor segments from youtube videos (in safari only, not the youtube app).
Adguard - $12 maybe $6, their pricing is weird - Safari wide adblock. Also has a element picker that can remove headers, banners, etc to declutter, just like ublock origin on desktop.
TweaksforTwitter - $10? I think it got pulled down from the US app store. - De-shitifies Twitter.
StoptheMadness - $10 - So god damn much.
Hush - Free - Removes cookie banners and trackers.
Noir - $3 - Safari night mode for sites that don’t play along with system dark mode.
Rekt - $1 - Removes many “open in our app” banners and redirects amp links.
Sink for Reddit - Free - Removes reddit ads and ‘open in app’ banner.
Banish - $3 - Another option that removes many “open in our app” banners.
Userscripts - Free - Loads whatever custom 3rd party javascript of your choosing into sites.
A lot of these have redundant features, so something like StoptheMadness and Adguard might consolidate a lot of the others. I get that this looks like death by $3, but these are just what I’ve gathered over the years. I’d only recommend Adguard at a minimum, vinegar and sponsorblock if you don’t already have premium, and the others if they mean anything to you. Again these are all safari features so nothing that will change anything system wide or in other apps like youtube.
Edit: Also, StopTheMadness was unique in that it had a Mac version that included the firefox and chrome extensions. After unpacking the app bundle, I just copied the firefox folder and moved it to my windows computer. Works all the same. That dev is awesome and though no one likes paying for shit, I have no problem supporting regular people undoing the bullshit that is the modern internet.
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You can put Google-free Android forks on your phone or tablet. My phone is LinageOS with minimal Google footprint and my tablet has no gapps at all.
I use Gmail, Tasks, Drive and Calendar for the sake of convenience, since I could self-host all of these.
Do banking apps work?
Of course they work. Though if you’re rooted, you just need to install/flash a module named “Magiskhide” which will basically hide the apps your want from your root, as a lot of banking apps consider a rooted device not secure enough… (even if it completely is but whatever)
I’ve been looking into custom roms but for a bit but it will take a while before I feel confident enough to try it. I want to try it but I’m afraid that I will get locked out certain services like banks or ms365 for work. I’ll look into this Magishide tool.
(sorry for the late reply) Custom ROMs are something else and are in no way necessary for rooting the phone. You can totally root your phone with Magisk while staying on your manufacturer’s ROM, or flash (install) a custom ROM without rooting the phone and not being locked from anything your Android phone can already do. But you won’t have full access to your phone if you don’t root and will eventually need at least some degree of power over it, which is why most people root their phone too. But custom ROMs alone are also great, you can check if there are good ones (or if there are any) on xda-developers by searching your phone on it. But be careful and follow the instruction to the letter: you won’t be able to blame anybody for bricking your phone (look for hard brick and soft brick) as all authors clearly state they’re in no way responsible if you fuck up something and your phone doesn’t work anymore. The best thing to do as a beginner is to search deeply on the internet for days if not weeks in order to feel more confident and more importantly understand what is a ROM, what is a recovery (TWRP being the main one), a bootloader, etc, so you know what you’re going to do.
Consorsbank does. No Magisk required.
NFC and fingerprint scanner doesn’t.
It’s sad, 10-15 years ago it was as simple as Adblock :/
Now it’s nearly unavoidable and/or requires quite a few changes to your native device to make it more secure
Yeah, for all of Jobs’ “vision” cell phones were really just a way to profit of of free information.
When you say Google/Meta, do not create a vacuum for people to fall into the Apple fake privacy rabbit hole. Androids can be used without a Google account. Apple devices are practically impossible to use without Apple account.
I’m concerned about when governments get ahold of usable quantum computers.
We’ll always be one step ahead of the bad guys. Fortunately we have places like this where like-minded people can gather who understand the dangers.
There are ways around it if you are willing to put in the work and deal with incoveniences.
For example, never use native Android or iOS, flash a custom ROM, never install proprietary apps, just that cuts a lot out. Only use cash for all stores and services, never carry payment cards with you, that wipes out financial tracking. Never give real info to stores. Use email aliases so different people have a different address. Don’t use Windows on computer if the prgrams you use are not exclusive to Windows.
Those can be the beginner steps to how to be almost invisible in society. One thing I’ve done is try to push people onto SimpleX chat app for messaging so I can have a different random ID with each person I message so there’s no contact info to share. Even people I know in person, we hang out together, I try to get them on SimpleX in place of Signal.
While I agree with all of that…. One of the biggest issues is employment. For instance through my job I’m forced to use both google and meta services, and I can’t “opt out” or “just don’t install it”. It’s a condition of employment. So of course you can say “just quit your job” but that’s not really viable is it? Over phone apps? And carrying two phones I will never do…… so……
Don’t let your employer use your personal stuff for their needs. If they need you to have a phone for work, then they need to provide that, and you can leave that at work. The same with Alphabet- and Meta-services; that stays on the employers devices, never your own.
Any job that forces you to use Meta services is probably exploiting you in other ways and isn’t worth whatever they’re paying you. Even employees of Facebook don’t have to do this.
Lol no they’re not. It’s a small company and I know everyone. I have to use WhatsApp to communicate with various 3rd party vendors in Europe because that’s the standard there. That’s all.
Run Whatsapp in a sandbox on a separate profile with minimal permissions. Disable it when you don’t actively need it. Only use the absolute minimum of meta services, and only provide the minimum of your personal information.
And for google use a new blank account, never connect it to an account that has any of your personal information.
Oh shit. Yeah I kinda forgot Whatsapp is an international standard of communication. That’s still different than requiring you to run it in on your personal devices through.
That is a run off, complete your sentence.
I’m sorry to be that guy, but it’s the “natural” way things have to go in order to preserve (modern) society.
I’m from Chile for example, and here we literally CRAVE for a mass surveilence solution in order to prevent crime (i’ve gotten robbed 3 times in the last year and i don’t even live in the capital). And that’s even nothing compared to the situation our neighbour countries have to deal with (mostly corruption and drug gangs ruining everything).
If you want to live a more peaceful and calm life, that’s totally okay. But it is probably better that YOU looked into a new place to live (a house by the beach or the woods perhaps?) rather than expecting society to adapt to your needs.
Edit: Added the word “modern”.
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I do have the option of living in a more calm and pretty much crime-free place with my grandparents.
But i don’t want to get distanced with the rest of my family & friends, besides, i like living in a city, having things to do, walking in busy streets, i dunno, it’s just what i like. :)
This feels like a pretty ignorant response. It’s not easy to move and it’s a reasonable request to get robbed fewer than 3 times a year.
Unless I’m misunderstanding, maybe?
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OP doesn’t feel safe specifically in regards to privacy, which of course, is getting harder and harder to get in populated areas of 1st world countries.
And i just didin’t want to say “get used to it” because it’s apparently something that OP feels really concerned about.
I think a lot of people would want to move to more isolated, rural areas to gain back their privacy, and i think that’s an issue that’s gonna get more and more talked about in the next generations.
Have you thought that maybe eradicating social inequality, preventing people from getting desperate and committing crimes, as well as a better funding in education would be less effective than mass surveillance?
That has been our current goverment’s main goal and i think they’ve done great advances on that regard.
However, it is very difficult to reach people who are already well into a life of crime, not mentioning that a big deal of criminals in the country are inmigrants, (i don’t have anything against inmigration, no matter their place of origin, just to be clear) but it makes it a lot harder to help them due to their irregular situation.
Wow you had a good start pero la cagaste weon.
You probably don’t deserve the downvotes for having spoken your mind, but you might want to be careful of what you wish for. My heart goes out to you for having to face the realities of your own life and conditions, but there is no silver bullet and no utopia to be had until some people are drawn to screw over others for whatever diminishing advantage they derive from their actions, while offloading (“externalizing”) the actual costs onto others and onto society at large.
I can see why you’d consider an all-powerful surveillance state as an option in your specific situation – but as a thought experiment on the same lines, would you consider moving to say China – where your wishes of total surveillance and absolute power are being implemented to the fullest extent possible – also, arguably to “preserve its society”? It has all the pulls of big city life…
Sadly, China itself is very likely on the path of forced breeding of its subjects to stabilize its population statistics (not its social fabric), from all the power and control they possess over their people, and from all the surveillance big data and analysis they’ve built for themselves. Would you want to be that unfortunate, unwilling parent, or even more unfortunate, that unwanted child, where your every step, every thought is logged and analyzed by machines, leading to actions and consequences pre-determined by a handful of all-powerful rulers?
This is probably the most extreme example there is, but all I’m saying is be careful of what you wish for…
Thanks for your answer.
Well, i do definetly not plan on eventually moving to somewhere like China mostly beacuse of the strict (and abusive) restrictions and censorship that take place there.
As for the security aspect, i’m all for it 👍
Now, you did mention parenthood and…
For me i believe it wouldn’t be an issues since i DO plan on having children in the future.
But that’s just MY case i’m talking about.
Of course that it would be abusive to restrict your freedom in exchange for security without your consent. (And even more so, to take away your vote for deciding who’s in charge of the country for the next period, or worse, an undetermined period of time). AKA Dictatorship
And it is absolutely cruel to force people (specially women) to have children if they don’t want to.
If you want to live a more peaceful and safe life, that’s totally okay, but it’s probably better that YOU looked into a new place to live rather than expecting society to adapt to your needs.
There’s actually a lot to look forward to. In fact you’re talking on one of those reasons right now.
e2ee is only a recent thing which is significantly more private. You can have an entirely private FOSS operating system that has parity with Windows for free.
The privacy and FOSS ecosystems are thriving more then ever. There are more VPN providers then ever before, and Tor gets better and better.
We have decentralized social media like the fedi which gives complete freedom against corporate control.
We have all sorts of amazing FOSS tools out there. We even have an AI that can be run completely locally and with custom unfiltered models that is very close to competitive with ChatGPT, and also free.
None of these things even existed like 10 years ago, or were in their infancy. They’re all competitive to modern corporate alternatives. Privacy alternatives are by far in the best state they’ve ever been, and they’ll just continue to improve as the community grows larger.
We can own all these tools and self host. In fact we’ve never been able to “own” anywhere near as much as we can today.
Thanks for providing a positive perspective! It’s really important we don’t lose sight of the good things.
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aaand there’s intel management engine and amd platform security procesor which undermine your foss efforts on most platforms
Why do people want to be doomers over literally nothing. There’s so much good that you’re just ignoring.
Intel can read RAM directly and other parameters using their built in security systems on certain chips. Maybe do more research first to understand why that is distressing. There are some projects for open source CPUs on-going.
I’ve looked into this extensively but see zero actual real world effects other then being a boogyman to hardcore FOSS nerds
Idk what you’re talking about, it’s been done plenty of times?
Plus we dont even really know what new “Security” tech their cooking up nowadays. Especially with in-house chips like Apple M chips.
Meltdown Redux: Intel Flaw Lets Hackers Siphon Secrets from Millions of PCs
This is why we need RISC-V.
Even phones have security chips in them these days.
Fun fact: Intel introduced the Management Engine right around the time they joined the NSA’s PRISM program.
I feel like the management engine card is sneakily changing the threat model in the middle of the conversation.
Is it bad? Yes. Is it a big source of security holes? Absolutely.
Is it a way that Facebook is going to profile you to try and sell you to advertisers? Or a reason why you can’t ditch Windows? No.
What does ditching windows have to do with security chips? OS sits above the hardware so that does not make sense. Any linux distro is just as susceptible as it stands.
No ones worried about social media companies messing with your hardware (not yet). That’s off-topic. Besides, legally nothing stops Intel or AMD from just selling the harvested data to Fb or whoever so that point is kind of moot too.
Actually news just broke as I was writing this and guess what. Now there is a bug allowing browser exploitation of the CPU using… Javascript! What a time to be alive…
AMD (for that matter, any other processor manufacturer) isn’t off the hook either - eg. see “Platform Security Processor”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor
They’ve been locking processors to individual motherboards and eliminating second-hand resale value for “enterprise” hardware in the name of “security” too: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-psb-vendor-locks-epyc-cpus-for-enhanced-security-at-a-cost/
If that was our only problem and most people would be using FLOSS software I’d be happy. Intel ME is bad but you can have a “good enough” usage of tech today.
Thank you for the Hopium
Thank you, author!
What is this local ChatGPT alternative you are talking about?
What happened to the ethos of the original internet cultures that were so dominant. It’s like large swaths of that generation grew up and sold out to become the oppressors. And the other portion are being crushed by that system.
I think the end of net neutrality hastened there older internet’s demise. now corps are free to monetize as much as they like.
Yup. When net neutrality died it let a few corporate overlords rise up and kill off much of the old free web. What much of us grew up on was a much fewer, wilder web. One you could still dream on and where you could still think damned near any new thing could come from anyone. Now, you pretty much have to already have $.
Wait, what do you mean Net Neutrality died? I thought they lost signing the bill to end it?
When was the last time you accessed a http website (not https)? Basically any schmuck in his basement could cobble one up. Nowadays you have to rent a server from some cloud service which goes against the whole net neutrality concept.
People just stopped bothering when their browser screams at them for accessing an unsafe website. That’s where net neutrality died IMO.
Wait, I don’t get this. Https certs are trivial to acquire and keep up-to-date with Let’s Encrypt. You can deploy a server like Caddy that will handle most of it for you. I’m a schmuck whose own website is self-hosted and I put an nginx rule to redirect http to https, because I don’t think anyone along the path between your computer and my website deserves to eavesdrop on the conversation.
The path of least resistance isn’t self-hosting anymore. No matter how easy it is, a twitter/facebook/youtube account will give you much more credibility and reach for a smaller cost and less setup time. I suppose I didn’t include that in the original message because I didn’t want to treat self-hosted websites and user accounts on large websites as similar, but it seems like they fulfill the same purpose nowadays.
Only a small % of people were on the internet then it grew and grew and the new people flocked to new spaces and didn’t like the old internet culture because it was quite elitist and toxic.
Thread closed. Dont insult the community.
Ich bin nicht die Signatur, ich putz hier nur.
1v1 me snitzel boy
You say elitist as if it was a bad thing. As to toxic, 1990s online communities has no comparison with casual baseline hostility everywhere today that is just off the charts. In fact, Lemmy already has enough of it for me to start disliking commenting. This is what almost drove me offline in the last few years.
I’m not sure still care enough to run my own instance and enforce stricter standards. It’s all so much work and ultimatively futile.
This is such a surreal comment I feel like we have two completely different experiences. I found the old internet to be full of flame wars and hostility, which at the time I had no issue with and definitely participated. Today’s internet is overly an nice hugbox. The stuff I used to say in 2002 would probably land me in jail today.
The technical communities were different. Yes, we had flamewars but these were largely rituals. That things we used to say would now land you in jail is a testament to how oppressive our socities have become. It’s definitely a contributing factor to the trend of capable people disengaging.
I wasn’t in the technical communities only gaming. I agree that it’s a testament to how oppressive society is but I also think things were taken way to far back then.
It sucks you feel afraid to comment, I definitely understand how you feel. Even if someone responds to you in a hostile way I’ve seen the rest of the community come in for support. And really, report bad actors. Having a good community isn’t easy.
Money happened.
There’s a reason why I’m structuring a home server build right now, I’m so tired of this internet, I just want to enjoy my things and not feel like an asshole supporting these companies. I don’t want to live in a dystopian net, even though we’re slowly approaching it. What will I do about private messaging? Who knows, I might have to make my own app to encrypt my messages before sending them through another app.
I genuinely believe that this is nothing new. Governments have just learned in the last few years that most of their citizenry don’t give a shit about privacy. They’re just making it official, so it can be penalized if you openly try to do something about it. I think…
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I get that not everything can be free. I’m more than willing to pay for sites and services that have value to me. But companies constantly selling your data, blasting you with advertisements and then having the gall to ask you to pay for the pleasure? It’s blatant rent-seeking.
I bought a lifetime license for the Spark email app. I even sent them some extra money when I learned their engineers are in the UK. Then they pushed out an update that removed the feature that caused me to buy their app in the first place, locked half of the other features behind a subscription, and said that since it’s an “update”, the previous lifetime subscriptions don’t count. Mother fuckers! Fuck the Spark team. I uninstalled it, gave them a 1 star review, and installed Fair Email. It’s a better app in most ways, is completely free, and is privacy focused. The only thing is that it’s missing the one feature I paid for, which was to be able to long press an email, tap “search for all emails by sender”, and then bulk action them. It was really useful for bulk deleting all Amazon confirmations and stuff like that.
I’ve had a couple pieces of software revoke my lifetime licenses when they switched to fully subscription (even though they swore lifetime license holders would be grandfathered). I get needing to make money to pay your software engineers to keep pushing out updates but man I hate this subscription hell we live in now
Software engineers have always needed to be paid, and companies got along just fine without subscription services. Bill Gates was the richest man in the world for the majority of my lifetime without a subscription service. The greed these days is immeasurable and needs to stop. It’s ruining everything! I just noticed today that they’re using the information band of the HD radio waves to push text ads to the car stereo while songs are playing now, instead of delivering song info like they said they’d do when they captured those public frequencies.
It truly sucks. but seeing decentralized/open-source projects - Lemmy, I2P/TOR, Linux, etc. warms my heart. It helps me see there’s truth out there and pushes me forward down this path.
