I’m actually glad for it. It made me switch to Linux, discover Mullvad Browser and their VPN combo, get a GrapheneOS phone, find an amazing Freetube YT desktop client, and dabble with Home Assistant and PIHole. Plus I migrated to Protonmail and Kagi as my search, and Lemmy instead of reddit is also an amazing change, the discussions I’ve seen so far feel better and more in depth, and I’m enjoying my time here so far. The lack of endless content is also great, to help with implementing Digital Minimalism.
So, while I hate any large corporation and their greed with more and more passion, it has lead me to a nice privacy journey, for which I’m glad.
Same for me. I switched to Linux, left reddit currently migrating to proton mail and my next phone will be one where I can install Graphene OS onto. More changes will come soon.
Don’t get stuck w Protonmail. I did, not worth.
Why and what would you recommend instead?
Host own email, just buy a domain.
Proton is still worth it IMO, e-mail is inherently unsafe and Proton still beats using Gmail or Outlook.
It does but at ~$80/year, you might as well buy a domain and host your own email…
Yes, and host it on Proton. They are pretty reasonably priced compared to paid offerings by Microsoft and Google, and even if you pay them you are still the product. With proton you are the customer.
Looked into Kagi. Seems interesting. Personally, I use either Brave search or Searx. There’s was post over at [email protected] about open source alternatives to ChatGPT and I might look into those. But I definitely keep Kagi in mind. By the way, How good is Kagi for,um… “sailing the high seas”?
Yes but thats a lot of work, what if all this was already setup
Wow, are you me?? :D
I almost did the same, just my phone is not a pixel, so i had to resort to some other custom ROM. And I still just use good ol’ firefox with proton VPN most of the time.
P.S. I also blocked our TV from accessing the internet as well. Ex. Codeberg is a GitHub replacement, and on mobile Grayjay/LibreTube works great for youtube.
Can you use tap to pay?
If not, there’s always the universal three step solution:
Step 1: buy a stick on credit card holder and stick it on your phone Step 2: put in basically any modern credit card Step 3: tap to pay
yeah but then you are limited to 1 card, I have my travel card(myki), credit card etc all on the wallet app.
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Haha, so true. I really really miss the “old” interwebz. Imagine the content of back-then with the hardware of today. The dream of yesteryear would come true. A blazingly fast net. Just html with a bit of JS (when really needed). Not 10 frameworks (each used for one function), dozens of mb of graphics, a gazillion of cookies and tracker-scripts and… Jeez.
Today i need so much stuff to fight the other stuff, it’s stuffmageddon.
Oh and if you’re also European you can also fight (for free!) the silly cookie-war.
some of our clients are on what the telco calls ‘extended’ dsl. they’re waaaay tf out at the ‘end of the line’ where speeds can be as shitty as 250-500kbps; there’s even a couple still on dialup. so we definitely consider the weight of a page and how many connections are made for each when we do our own sites.
I’d love that… The weight-considered-site that is. Not the 500k line 😁
4chan back before the Nazi takeover was like the wild west. My favorite part was “Lithursday,” when we would share images with embedded PDFs of copyrighted content, including rare books, anarchist materials, and military manuals. I often wonder if those unusually large .jpgs are still floating around the internet waiting to be unlocked. I also saw legitimate acts of activism and terrorism unfolding live, without the interpretation and propaganda of the state.
Oh man, I remember that. I’m sure I still have an Anarchist 's Cookbook floating around from one of those
Oh yes… The rise (and fall) of 4chan. At least the site is still relatively lean, so that’s that 🤷🏻♂️
Ha! Recently went to breakfast with a couple of new neighbors (partners).
They were asking me what apps I enjoyed and I told them that I WAS enjoying Apollo. Told them I left Reddit. They sort looked at me. They later said they both worked at home. Their job was creating ad space for the web. One of them gave me the enshitification face. Sigh.
They would have regretted asking me this. They’d be opening an F-droid can of worms they couldn’t stop and my autistic ass wouldn’t be able to gauge if it made them uncomfortable.
What is “the enshitification face”
I can only imagine horrible things
What is “the enshitification face”
maybe one of these?
The browser in my computer at work doesn’t have an ad blocker. I haven’t installed one because I most of the time I’m using it to access our intranet. But when I do happen to use the internet, damn are there so many ads! They literally block the content I’m trying to read, and come back even when I try to close it.
All that to say, due to enshittification I will forever keep my ad blocker on my personal computer.
Can’t imagine what the web is like outside of ublock origin…
The few websites I see on pcs by clients are essentially state backed so they don’t have ads as well.Scary world I am not eager to experience.
I’m baffled when companies that self-host DNS don’t have DNS-level adblocking.
It’s because there’s websites out there that will entirely break, and for really dumb fucking reasons. I’ve seen some sites not even load due to google tag manager being blocked. Most of the time it’s a signal to me that I don’t want to have anything to do with that domain.
However, if this was at work, that would be a call to IT. Multiply that by potentially hundreds of calls on the regular, and that could get really expensive.
The better solution here I think, is to default the browser install with uBlock Origin already there. Then allow the user the power to toggle the addon to their own liking. Then last, train your employees to know what the addon is, and how to use it.
Then it’s the best of both worlds: websites aren’t necessarily breaking for all users, ads are absent as a default state, and users are empowered to control their own experience. (And yes there’s still going to be Jims and Karens calling for support, but they’re going to regardless, those types will always find a reason.)
It’s wild using a browser without a blocker. I’ve had one since they first started appearing so the internet I know is very different to reality. On the rare occassion I use a browser that allows ads, it feels like shit’s broken. It’s so hard to get anything done and a chore to read or view content.
It’s almost as though the overbearing Yahoo/Ask! toolbars that used to plague everyone’s Internet Explorer back in the day have mutated and infected the internet at large. Now most websites feel like one useless, giant malware-riddled toolbar.
No.1 Apparently not present on uBlock Origin, which makes it not a problem for me (though it’s shite that they are doing it anyway). I don’t use YouTube that often anyways.
No.2 You are not loosing a lot - it’s most likely some crappy video about a guy slipping on a banana peel or some shit like this - 99.9% you are not missing on much :D
Yeah, the developers of AdBlock Plus have come out stating the problem is on their side.
https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1746263759495077919
If you haven’t switched to uBlock Origin, then now is the time.
See as much as I dislike the company, I can see how it would make sense from a business and logic point of view. They are paying for the servers and, to some extent and form, for the content, and by using any ad blocking content you sabotage their earnings from this platform. I’m surprised they are not blocking browsers with said plugins, but that would cause a major uproar. But then again, not much competition around…
Google is a Trillion dollar company. Fleecing the YouTube users for another 10m a year is pure hardcore end game free market capitalism.
Fuck them.
They are sabotaging their own platform because of greed.
Most wouldn’t be using an ad blocker if it weren’t for their anti-consumer practices.
fr, i didn’t use for the longest time because a 5 seconds ad before every video and some on the side never bothered me much, it was when it started being 2 UNSKIPABBLE ADS BEFORE EVERY VIDEO, PLUS MID ROLL ADS that I couldn’t deal with it anymore
Sure, the money has to come from somewhere, but, no ad server has ever managed to fully eradicate malware from the ads they serve and some sites have so much of the page covered in ads that the site simply isn’t navigable without an ad blocker. The first is on the ad server companies, but the second one is just stupid. I will simply never trust ad servers anymore after having seen computers destroyed by ad-delivered malware, including one of my own. Even if the websites themselves go back to a more restrained and reasonable number of ads, I will never turn my ad blocker off for simple safety reasons.
Browsers are leading slower and slower
That’s because of heavy use of JavaScript and frameworks like React. Websites like Facebook are a nightmare to deal with.
++ social media has killed personal blogs. Which is one of the biggest losses to me.
What I don’t get is how most places, people get mad at us for not being able to read an article due to the paywall. I mean, I’m not going to subscribe to 50 shitty news sites just so I can read someone’s damn random shit.
This is my biggest gripe with lemmy. A MASSIVE amount of links I try to follow is just paywalls or so damn bloated with garbage it isn’t worth the effort
For real tho, I’m not paying Netflix money for a single damn news outlet. The prices are absurd.
I just don’t look at it if I have to make an account.
Same. Those sites simply don’t exist to me. If it’s so important that I see it, then copy/paste the content.
Right? If your message is important, then set it free. If it’s not, then I’m not gonna care.
It’s like they’re trying to show you a party that’s going on in some private location, but you don’t get in, because you don’t have an account. Well then, they say, if the account is free and you still don’t make it, it’s not our fault. So they close you out.
You telling them to “just copy and paste the content” is like telling them to send you a photo/video of the party. It’s not the same as being there.
Yep, whenever people text me an Instagram or TikTok URL, I just scroll past it. I don’t even bother to find out what it’s supposed to be about, it’s completely inconsequential to me.
I have told my wife and several of my friends stop sending me things from ________, ________, and _________. I can’t see them and I refuse to do what is required.
Which is 100% fine by them.
They’ve created a situation where we HAVE to use ad-blockers for security, so they instead have to sell our data.
If they can’t make money off ads OR selling our data AND we won’t pay to view the content, all we’re really doing is using up their bandwidth.
My thought exactly, and I don’t feel like missing out either
You’re missing nothing on Instagram.
Disagree. There are many amazing creators on the app creating beautiful art and music.
Ha ha ha! This is a problem for you? I WAS BORN IN IT MOLDED BY IT
Cornerstones of the internet:
- social media
- content sharing (video, audio media)
- websites
Internet resources ruined by ads/corporate greed:
- social media (full of ads, borderline unusable without ad block)
- content sharing (account sharing blocks (Netflix) war on adblockers (YouTube) etc)
- e-mail (spam)
- websites (ads, borderline unusable without adblockers, refuses to load with adblockers)
gg everyone. Time to reinvent everything.
So true. I’d like to add that also because of ads, social media and other websites are full of nonsense clickbait content, and every part of the user experience is designed to keep you scrolling through said content. Even with an adblocker, it’s like wading through a swamp to find anything actually worth looking for. (Of course, there are still websites with no ads, and even the ones with ads aren’t always horrible. But generally, shit sucks.)
Personally i’m using Librewolf browser and not experiencing any of that. I do belive that even vanilla Firefox would do.
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Yes, you just set a Firefox account. You can also easily import your saved favourites.
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Is quicker to search a tutorial
Newpipe Lads rejoice
Use Invidious/yewtu.be instead of Youtube itself
Switch to either Brave or Librewolf
Use archive.is (or archive.ph) to view websites locked behind a paywall or email block
Tell friends and family to share said content in person
Fear not my friend! We can take back the Internet by refusing Big Tech’s services.
I wouldn’t recommend brave browser tbh. Librewolf or Firefox it is
Brave definitely feels like some sortve liability. I think it’s still owned by a Chinese company right?
Regardless, I switched off brave because I was tired of getting ads in the browser. Been using ff for a while now
Do not cave. Be strong bratan. Either they cut the shit, or you leave that part of the internet.
I look at Lemmy far less than I did Reddit.
I read only one subreddit still and it is Am I The Asshole, it is very easy to spot the ads because only one add matches the format of the posts. Anything that doesn’t start with AITA is an ad.
That gives me way more time to read books that I have been putting off. Starting with a few books by Cory Doctorow who coined that term enshittification.
It is a lot easier to make time for reading when watching a video will mean an ad before, during, and after every 5 minute clip. I subscribe to a few news shows so I can listen to them as podcasts while I work to support without having ads.
