^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.
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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You can buy music from Bandcamp. You get it drm free. There may be other sites that sell music too, but Bandcamp is the one I’ve been using.
You can also still buy CD/vinyl and rip it yourself.
You need to host Jellyfin on your own server. For example, you can get a micro pc and attach a hard drive to it with N terabytes of your legally acquired movies and tv shows.
Getting it working right is a pain (I keep running into problems where it stops working, or the metadata is wrong, it forgets how to access the drive, and so on). You also need to ensure it has an IP address to access it from afar, and set us SSL encryption if you want secure access from afar. Expect to put aside several hours to set it up, and then several more to fix it when it breaks inexplicably days or months down the line.
Then you can connect to it from your browser directly or via the jellyfin app. Apple TV even has a jellyfin app, so I can watch from my parents’ TV setup. You can set things up so that different users can access different shows even.
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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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.
Mmmm a nice warm pile.
It’s 100% happening outside as well though invasive ad placements, restriction of access to pleasant environments and underfunding of public services and property, like parks and such. It just takes much longer
Download our free mobile app to enter the park.
Oh god, I hate how I feel like I could actually encounter this.
How’s your local air quality?
except there absolutely is. I live in what used to be a literal forest with a road through it and now its smog and tire dust the moment yoy open a door or window.
Urbanisation and deforestation are not the same as enshitification tho.
It’s a bit unfortunate that “increased degree in which something is shit” sounds like what the word should mean, and I suppose it then sort of does.
It’s nice to have a word that describes the investor-driven incentives to worsen a service/product to milk out more short-term revenue. The larger a market capture is, the more that can be pushed without an alternative being a threat.
It’s the cycle of “provide a good quality service that makes everybody happy” -> market capture -> shareholders push for increase revenue at the expense of quality as there is no competition.
I left a lot out but I think overall it still counts. this formerly middle of nowhere town grew too big due to high end highrise projects and everyone wanted to live in lovely little forest tower with a view but making the car and bike infrastructure able to support the additional homes isn’t profitable so getting in and out is bottlenecked massively, local businesses have been replaced by more housing projects so you have to go farther to get food and stuff.
so basically once upon a time nothing was here and you had to drive out far to get anything. then the town picked up over several decades and you didnt have to go anywhere because everything was there. then they got rid of everything and brought in more people so you have to drive again but now in traffic, all to line the pockets of mainly two companies’ execs.
Hm. I didn’t argue against anything of what you’re saying here. I’m just saying that it arguably isn’t “enshitification”.
Enshittification is the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products such as Amazon, Facebook, Google Search, Twitter, Bandcamp, Reddit, Uber, and Unity
I don’t see how this is very contentious either.
the fossil fuel industry has entered the chat
Depends on the dogs, IME.
I wish I agreed with this, but every day more forests and fields are knocked down to make room for more shitty subdivisions in my area. The few farmers that have held out and still use their land on the middle of the city are heroes, but I know that within a few decades they will slowly dissappear, as the farmers die and their kids cash in on that appreciated land.
Not like farmers don’t abuse and exploit the land themselves. It’s just a bit more aesthetic.
There’s no enshittification outside.
Just watch out for the literal shit some irresponsible pet owners leave behind… Other than that, this is great advice
Haha… I was waiting for this solve-all-issues-by-moving-to-cave kind of reply.
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 to 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.
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!
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
Support indie bussiness, especially local business.
disable JavaScript and images in your browser
stick to “publisher” sites rather than “platform” sites / Web 2.0 / social media
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.
Go to spacex. Steal a rocket. Live on the moon.
You mean die trying to leave earth?
Watch Dogs 2 eh?
Self host as much as you can. Use smaller services when you can’t. And pay for things you don’t host yourself. If it’s free to you, it’s because you’re the product.
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
Not the search engine. The Android app has a feature called App Tracking Protection that blocks trackers in other apps, akin to PiHole, but run on the device.
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.
duckcuckgo is obsolete. Use searx.space
I hear people frequently say this.
Searx is basically a proxy. If you had an actual proxy… you would achieve the exact same benefits. Its good for making it difficult… or extremely difficult to tie a person’s real identity, directly to their search query.
Another thing that searx does is sends your query to google. This is not good for privacy. But sometimes it gives you additional results.
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 was just talking about this yesterday.
My wife has a top of the line “remarkable” with upgraded storage space, she’s grandfathered into that option, which is no longer available. it’s now entirely monthly subscriptions, she wouldn’t have had the opportunity if she weren’t an early adopter.
We used to swear by “never buy iteration 1 of a generation” but today it seems that if a product is going to be successful, it’s going to get degraded in iteration 2.
Textbook enshittification. Now you have to take a chance on something being good and the company sticking around, and buy in before it gets on the radar of investors.
Be veeeeeery wary of browser addons. They gain access to the data of every web page. Can monitor keystrokes, etc. so… usernames, passwords, bank accounts. How hard would it be for a developer to maliciously add code that is distributed to thousands of devices?
Pretty easy if you ask XZ
this is shamelessly spreading FUD. The XZ issue has been resolved and was resolved very quickly. The author is a hero.
It’s an example of malicious code sneaking in. I’m using this example because it is recent and well known. Regardless of the speed in which it was corrected, it is a valid example.
