I would say there’s been a mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon and from Reddit to Lemmy. The current numbers are still a small fraction of the original services, but the federated services have reached a critical mass where they now offer comparable value. YouTube hasn’t been ubiquitous for that long and it’s already pretty enshittified. I see a lot of people who are fed up with it and looking for an alternative. The peertube platform is there, I think with more people and content and it’ll join the ranks.

Me if that happens:

jk, i barely use YT as it is. I’m waiting for the YT ToS update that causes a mass migration to peertube

I’m convinced Mark Zuckerberg had a wet dream about pupil tracking when he bought Oculus.

People who are proud of getting a good deal via an app break my heart. Most folks I know like that are not strapped for cash. They just like the feeling of getting a bargain. They don’t consider that the prices are artificially inflated. They don’t need the sale item. And in the long run they’ll probably end up paying more when the stores know their purchasing habits and have A/B tested them enough to know how to provide as little as possible while charging as much as a customer can stomach.

If a coupon requires an app, I don’t by that item. Especially when it comes to groceries. When it comes to store cards, most let you use a phone number instead of scanning the card. So plug in a random number at checkout. You can often get a hit on the first try. Then pay in cash. Dirty up someone else’s data and give these stores nothing on you. Seriously, if people keep giving in, it’s guaranteed to get worse. First the store card, then the app, what’s next?

I’m with you 100% up to the “little recourse,” I think there’s more options now than there have ever been. Open source (including linux and self hosting) are about the only tech-future things I’m genuinely excited about.

There’s still a learning curve and progress to be made, for sure. However, anecdotally, I’ve seen programming and hosting become vastly more accessible in the last 15 years. Also, not everyone needs to self host, people just need to know someone who is willing and able to set them up.

Not saying it’s a guarantee, but it’s a possible way out, at least. And being here on lemmy, reading and writing about these issues is a good sign there’s movement in the right direction.

Logs your usage, lets you see one week of history. Meanwhile sells the entire usage history of you and everyone in your contact list to anyone willing to pay.

Clients try to get you to pay as much as possible for toilet paper (subscription tp anyone? Will be cheaper in first stage of enshittification until they monopolize the market). Other clients try to correlate the success of political propaganda with how regular you are. Elected officials won’t regulate, because it’s a tool they had to master to get elected.

On the plus side, Lemmy exists and that’s a step in the right direction. Would work that into toilet metaphor but don’t wanna ramble.

Not to mention it would reduce all the underride crashes.

All these improved vehicle safety standards are generally for bumper-to-bumper collisions, not windshield-to-truck-bed. Frontline released a well-done 2023 episode on it. Highly recommend.

Edit: md link

Yeah, even Toy Story 1 animation is dated, which is feature-quality, not TV, and it came out after Reboot.

I admire the historic technical feat. For example, they didn’t have inverse kinematics back then, meaning they couldn’t plant the character’s feet on the ground or hands on a surface and move the body without the limbs moving as well. They’d have to repose the hands and feet to line up. It’s why so many shots don’t show their feet unless they’re standing still and why the boy (enzo?) is always diving into the shot.

And all that data probably takes up less room than a few pictures, could easily be stored locally, and encrypted locally before backing up on a server. But why give individuals control and privacy over their own behavior and history when you can sell it to anyone and keep the profits for yourself? /s

scruffy-seconded.gif

I’ve been surprised by how effective it’s been to say, respectfully, “this is important to me,” maybe adding “here’s why.” Got all my siblings, mom, SO, and best friend on Signal, that’s a vast majority of my online conversations.

reddit is orders of magnitude bigger then lemmy, but I find lemmy high quality and has more people with similar values- more than i could ever keep up with.

Back when Adobe went subscription-only, I stopped using it on my personal work and devices even though a lot of my previous work depended on it. Had to switch to different tools, but now there are better options. Not only has Adobe stagnated, but they caused an even bigger exodus when they messed with the ToS to train ai on user data.

I switch to linux a few years ago and now when I have jobs that use windows I realize how clunky it actually is, and it’s only getting worse while linux has been getting better.

I’m fully degoogled (also a graphineOS user). It took me years to eliminate each service, but I was sick of these giant companies that could never give me the things I wanted because in interferes with what they want (ad revenue). The only thing you can do is take it all back. Participate as little as possible. These companies will not stop getting worse while people continue to use them.

It can be inconvenient, time-consuming, and hard, but there are options, and it is a lot easier now than it was a decade ago. I see no reason why it wont continue to get easier and more accessible. That’s why it’s important for tech savvy folks to do what they can, now, and make it easier for those who come after them. Personally, I’ve done a lot for myself, but need to learn more about hosting securely so I can offer close friends and family better alternatives that they can easily access.

Idk what your feed looks like but if it’s like mine-- posts hyping ai juxtaposed with posts from artists that are (rightfully) upset that their work is being used without their consent to train generative ai in a push to replace artists or devalue their work-- linkedin can feel pretty dire and soul sucking.

Well said and a core concept people need to understand to appreciate data privacy/sovereignty. Simply calling it data overlooks what it often is: your behavior over time. We don’t call it PII but few things are more personally identifying.

I was surprised by a recent, popular comment here on lemmy where someone advised against using cash because of missing out on rewards. A majority of people don’t appreciate the tradeoffs here. By default, banks and private companies have more info on us than we have on ourselves. To think that they’re going to do anything that benefits us more than them is naive. While not everything is zero sum, we are talking about extractive, profit seeking industries.

Cash seems like the best defense on this front. I recent switched back to cash, and continue to track my own finances; Bank sees $500 withdrawal; I see $34.45 at grocery store, $19.20 at hardware store, etc.

Pro tip: try random but memorable phone numbers at checkout. Now you can enjoy the savings, and salt/contaminate the data extraction of others. The more randomness (where and when you shop, what you buy, which numbers you use) the better.

All the metadata perhaps (still very valuable), but client-side, zero-access encryption means it’s encrypted before it hits the servers. So while a data leak might, for example, show who, when, and how much you’re emailing, it wouldn’t show the content of the email as gmail would.

Moving in the direction of better and voting with your dollars is an important step away from already enshittified structures, which I’d argue, are inherent to certain models and not others. EG: a self hosted, open source software developed by a non-profit could sell and incorporate and enshittify, but the possibility of forking is an effective disincentive that could easily eat projected gains.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. My only source of income for more than a decade has been creating media that people stream or watch in theaters, so I must disagree. Under the current capitalist system, people do get paid, but I’m with you that it’s exploitative. People commonly burnout and run themselves ragged trying to make ends meet. I know I did.

I’m skeptical that piracy hurts CEOs and shareholders as much as you think it does. Piracy is nothing new-- CEO wages and capitalism doesn’t seem to care. Those with power can increase prices on paying customers, decrease employee wages or headcounts, and/or start legally pursue pirates. The latter being least relevant to my point, but with digital steganography, watermarking, intrusive tracking, and corporate-friendly laws (see post)-- it’s worth making clear that CEOs and shareholders have plenty of tools already in place to make themselves whole. Heck, pirate from Prime Video and Bezos can increase AWS rates and extract it back from most folks via services they (or their families) do pay for.

Not to say it’s hopeless. I’d like to shine a gigantic spotlight on your last sentence:

indy games/music/etc bought directly from the creators

That’s the way forward. Heck, toss it on a jellyfin server and share it with a few close friends and family. The knowledge gap to do that is shrinking. When many folks know someone who knows how to host, they can start pooling their resources.

The false dichotomy of stream vs pirate mentioned in my first reply could be rephrased as: spending money and attention on media giants vs spending just attention on them. Why not spend neither money nor attention on media giants? Save it for individuals and small teams making cool things. That creates a market and draws in more people to make more cool things and does more damage than piracy. Personally, I don’t see anything on Disney+ (or prime, netflix, etc) worth prolonging the current state of media, so I don’t waste any time on it. I’ve come across a lot of good books, music, and inexpensive hobbies to fill the void in the meantime.

TL;DR: Current state of media sucks, but pays more than pirates. More pirates not paying is not as effective as retraining money and attention. If a pirate occasionally goes through the extra steps to pay someone instead of finding a torrent link, they’re still dedicating significant time engaging with the winners of the current capitalist system instead of seeking out and boosting better, lesser known options. It drags out the current state instead of nurturing existing solutions.

I agree with (and experience) the problems surrounding access to media that you described, but I would also describe myself as pretty anti-piracy. You can be anti-middleman and anti-rent-seeking without being pro-piracy. While piracy circumvents the problems you mentioned, the question it leaves unanswered is how the creator of the pirated media will afford basic necessities like food and shelter. Alternatives to streaming are scarce, but they do exist-- especially DRM-free music and books. These are not static systems. The market will follow the money, so if folks buy into the false dichotomy of stream vs pirate, industry will continue to invest in DRM and anti-piracy measures and creators will continue to submit to streaming services / media silos. I’d prefer a system with as few layers as possible between creator and consumer. Piracy only offers a solution for the latter.