Tips to reduce Enshittification of Internet
Tips to reduce Enshittification of Internet
^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.
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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 )
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I dont think paying money is the answer. But it may make sense for some people in some cases.
For example: for someone who uses gmail.. switching to protonmail is a huge leap. And donating money(or buying service) is a way to ensure that it remains sustainable and continues to grow.Someone needs to pay for cloud stuff. Free software works locally, but the moment servers get involved beyond a basic homepage, there's a monthly bill to be paid for every user on the platform.
For local software, you paid for your computer, maybe for your software, and the costs for running stuff on your computer are all on you; you can use that stuff as much as you're able to afford. For cloud software, the costs aren't that different, but as a free user, you're no longer paying the power and bandwidth fees that these services generate.
If you can't or don't want to pay, you subject yourself to the terms that come with the free versions of these services. Most of them provide incredible value for free, but free stuff will get terrible the moment investor funds run out. Every service people expect for free is either maintained by paying customers or is trying to undercut the market and destroy any chance of competition through investor funding. The latter is great for free users for the first part of it, but no company will use its monopoly just to benefit free users.
YouTube crushed the competition and only with investor money has TikTok managed to become relevant. Twitch is a loss leader in several countries because Bezos can afford it. Spotify could only be stopped by Apple's even shadier business tactics.
Free stuff works when it's run by a bunch of volunteers for a small group of people (small enough so server costs can be paid by donations or out of the admins' pockets) but the moment something becomes popular, the service will either require a lot of extra money or it'll fall over. If all of Reddit's free users went over to Lemmy, Lemmy servers would collapse left, right, and center.
The internet got where it is because investor money has had companies give away expensive services for free for years, decades even. That's not a sustainable model for obvious reasons, but if we don't get rid of the "everything should be free without ads" attitude, we'll only be helping investors and investor backed companies gain more market dominance.
Alternatively, use (and buy) local software. There's no reason for everything to be done through a web browser or cloud connected app. You'll lose the fancy new features for free, but if your software works for you, it'll work for you for years to come. No enshittification possible!