^Qn.
How to reduce the enshittification on various services.
( eg: Payment sites instead of Apps, Ads in Facebook site - I rarely use FB )
Any browser addons, scripts are welcome.
You seem to be taking about something other than enshittification, which has a specific meaning and isn’t just places not respecting privacy or whatever. Per Cory Doctorow (who invented the term) via Wikipedia:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
If enshittification is what you’re assist interested in reducing, check out Cory’s book, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.
Ok. Let me check the book.
Did you check the book
Yeah, just got it.
I’d start with ublock origin for browser extensions, and then add more things based on what you’re looking to do :)
You’ve already mentioned a few, but another might be to explore alternatives to the bad services and start a process to migrate over. That can look like anything from reducing your dependence on a service to moving over entirely.
ex. unfollow people and things you don’t care about
If you don’t want your experience to suffer from platforms seeking money, pay for services with a stable business plan. Avoid complex services that are free, even with an account. YouTube and Spotify will never be able to give you music for free without something in return.
You can try setting up alternative clients for services with ads, but that’ll be a tiring arms race as a user.
Pay for physical goods (DVDs, CDs) rather than stream. You can stream stuff from your own NAS if you have to, but don’t rely on streaming services to keep stuff around forever. I think Apple has the best track record in keeping content you rent (“buy”) for stuff you can only get through streaming, but I’m not 100% sure these days.
Make regular backups (use that GDPR request button) for large websites so you can keep your data and switch whenever something weird is going on. Also make sure to have backups of whatever cloud drive services you may be using on at least two other places (your local device and a NAS, or your device and another cloud service) in case you get banned.
Something more advanced: use your own domain for email. Various services, ranging from Google to Proton, will host your email for you for a couple of bucks a month. If any of them ever go to shit, move your email to another host and copy over all the old mail. Again, keep backups in case your account disappears all of the sudden; email is built to be resistant against outages of a few hours/days, so you can move if your account gets banned for no reason.
It’s no guarantee, but if you can, donate to the free and open source stuff you use. Many Lemmy servers wouldn’t exist without donations, for instance.
As for general safety, use uBlock Origin, but don’t mix ad blockers, or sites will break.
For mail, moving is already possible. DMA requires whatsapp/messenger to interoperate with other services. ( still facebook… aargh )
I haven’t figured out how rk activate that on my own WhatsApp, so while you’re right, I don’t think it’ll be quite that easy.
A way to keep control over your data is to run XMPP/Matrix bridges that a) unify all your messages into one single app and b) keep a copy of those messages under your control.
Doing this yourself requires quite some Linux skills (and a domain). You can use hosted services like Beeper but as far as I know, hosted services all respect deletion requests from the app and a service banning you could easily send a million delete requests to clear out your chat history.
Support indie bussiness, especially local business.
Start getting into self hosting, you dont need all that expensive hardware. An old laptop can get you started.
Heres some stuff you can do.
Fix youtube:
A script (with yt-dl) on a schedule checks a list of channels to download x amount latests videos from their channel.
Fix Television Streaming:
Jellyfin allows you to stream your own content regardless where you sourced it. I output the youtube videos from above in it
Fix Music Stream
Ive setup Navidrone to stream my music library. Previously i only ever played locally stored music but storage space limits forced me to look beyond and its been working well
Fix Cloud computing
Get full control and ownership of your data so it cant be exploited behind your back. Nextcloud is well documented on how to setup your own cloud system including office apps, calendars.
Fix personal online communication.
Signal appears to be one of the only ones competent to so it right.
In general on the web:
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Always ublock origin, I’ve yet to see a better one and i flat-out wont use the desktop web without.
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Use bookmarks for sites you visit regularly rather then giving search engine the extra traffic every time. This sounds super mild but its actually a focus lifehack. You dont need 90% of the shit your being distracted with.
Most people only need a handful of urls for a few functions. For me half of those are selfhosted and those that arent are in someway selected and configured for personal least hassle least shit experience. Ever since I bookmarked Wikipedia and wolfram i’ve used them more to get answers than conventional search engines.
Jellyfin allows you to stream your own content regardless where you sourced it. I output the youtube videos from above in it
Sorry for the dumb question, I’ve just never understood it, but where do I get the content from? Like, do I download from an online streaming site and upload the mp4 to Jellyfin? Or is there a better way?
Personally i tend to have 3 sources
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daily youtube videos automatically downloaded trough a script.
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dvd’s, automatic ripping machine is a piece of software to automatically helps you rip your old physical dvds. Ive recovered some great nostalgia that can no longer be obtained otherwise.
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whats this? A website? https://fmhy.net/ “Free media heck yeah” thats a weird name. It looks like a wikipedia of something, I wonder what thats all about.
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That’s up to you. It can be from anywhere. You can buy DVDs and rip them, buy digital downloads, or rip DVDs from the library or friends. You can also go the piracy route and find torrents or direct downloads.
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On Android, using an app like DuckDuckGo or TrackerControl is huge for protecting your data in other apps
Duckduckgo just fetch api from google and bing. So, basically you search on Gooogle or Bing using different frontend
I get the impression it might just be really hard to run your own search engine, so a new frontend is the best we can do.
Essentially, It really isnt that hard.
But
A) there is no unified project for the masses.
B) it is very hard to create a universal search engine that gives you needed info for something extremely unexpected like “reggae feline flames scanner” .Yeah, I mean a good search engine, comparable to Google. Even if the software is doable that’s a lot of data that has to be scraped and stored.
It would be dfficult to keep all kinds of random things in an affordable database.
I’m more concerned about the meaning of life. Which, conveniently is 42.
reduce the enshittification
Whatever you want to buy out there, do a proper research on it.
Most definitely , there will be a review of it, be it from YouTube, blogs; there should be someone talking about it (perks of the internet)
If not, you better run.
Being an early adoptor is a recipe for disappointments.
Also be mindful that a lot of online reviews might be sponsored, thus biased. I personally do look for reviews (ideally at least 2-3 different ones), but also for opinions of users on forums and other social media.
I go outside and roll around in the grass with my dogs. There’s no enshittification outside.
Careful where you roll around. You might roll into a warm pile of dog enshitification.
The best tip I can give you, one that actually has an impact is, if a system sucks, don’t be afraid to set up your own system.
I used to put all photos I wanted to share on DeviantArt, but that site has just got slower and overall worse the last decade.
Back in the spring of 2023 I had just got a new camera was getting more and more annoyed at dA for how slow it was.
So I decided to do it myself, I use digiKam as a photo organizer, it can create decent HTML galleries, so I use those and just built a nice HTML/CSS index page, and pop it all on a private webhost.
It is blazingly fast, I can use arrow key navigation in the galleries and it is just a fantastic experience.
And since I only really wanted a place to share my photos with friends and family it is enough for me.
I won’t link it here as it contains my name.
