Not sharing a service, but a talk I only recently discovered, probably here. From 2011 and more current than ever.

28c3: "The coming war on general computation" by Cory Doctorow.

Services I Use:

• LibreX (search engine)
• CloudTube (YouTube proxy)
• PeerTube (federated YouTube alternative)
• Tutanota (mail & calendar)
• Organic Maps (maps app based around OpenStreetMap)
• Cryptee (encrypted notes)
• Matrix (chat)
• LibreOffice + Collabora Office (office suite)
• Kiwix (offline Wikipedia & other wikis)
• NetNewsWire (RSS reader, for news)

Arms of the Fediverse I Use Regularly:

• Mastodon
• Pixelfed
• Lemmy
• PeerTube
• WordPress

Dormant Arms of the Fediverse:

• Friendica
• Kbin
• Funkwhale
• WriteFreely

I have installed Linux on all four of my laptops, and I'm hoping to migrate from my iPhone to a Pixel with DivestOS as soon as I move out of my parents' house (I'm currently 17), or sooner if possible.

I have also swapped many web apps for desktop apps, and my music collection has been based around CDs and DRM-free files since it started in 2016. In addition, I still use DVDs, VHS tapes, and (to a lesser extent) good old-fashioned Torrents for my films and TV shows.

If the internet becomes altogether too bad, there's always Gemini. Making web apps is trickier, but entirely feasible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

I think there was also a federated social media site on Gemini, which could interact with Mastodon, but I can't find it.

Libredirect is a Firefox addon that can redirect links to more privacy friendly services. For example, clicking someone's YouTube link will redirect you to Piped or Invidious instead.

https://libredirect.github.io/

I think it's time to stop and think whether we really need all of those services? We've been slowly trapped into social networks and various unecessary services through dark patterns, and now we somehow can't imagine being without them, even though they actively make everything worse.

What was the last time you watched a Youtube video that actually was worth the time, and wasn't just a shallow content about something vaguely interesting, but something you'll probably could live without? Do we really need to agregate news and articles from the whole internet, while there probably are good local newspaper/news sites that will get you up to speed, without giving you clickbait articles? For example, we have a pretty great news company that is independent and funded entierly by users, and it's enough for keeping up to speed on world events without having to scroll through a lot of bullshit.

The more enshitificated the internet gets, the more I'm starting to realize that I really don't need almost any of it. Sure, some things are pretty usefull, like cloud storage, but almost anything I needed so far was solved by just getting a NAS with Nextcloud. The only thing I really need the internet for is messaging and email. And if I want to stay up to date, we have amazing smaller local sites for both gaming news and for world news, and those two are enough.

The more that I think about my internet usage, the more I'm realizing that I don't really mind its enshitification - because ever since it started happening, I've been just removing addictions from my life and replacing it with more niche or smaller sites that are updated less frequently, don't stalk me, and I've slowly started to realize that thanks to that I can do a lot more done and don't get trapped by scrolling through clickbaity dopamine rush made to keep me glued to a screen.

I recommend reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40672036-digital-minimalism . I've already read it several times, and never managed to get into fully implementing it. I did stop using Facebook, and reduced my Reddit usage drastically during those years, but this enshitification is only making it easier to just not using anything I really don't need. I'm looking forward to WEI and other "You can't do this" stuff that will come with it, because it's exactly the trigger that will make me stop and think "Do I really need to do this? Or are there better ways how to solve this.". And the answer is almost always "Nope".

It certainly feels depressing but let's try to look on the bright side.

What we can do with FOSS is orders of magnitude more than what was possible a decade or two ago. Even geeks used Windows in the 1990s. Android is a privacy nightmare, but its forkable FOSS version is not so far upstream. For the hardware and low-level software, the open options are getting better: CoreBoot, Pinebooks, RISC-V etc. As are the services: E2E messaging, Fediverse, OSM, Wikipedia.

It's just that we're asking so much more of of these tools than we did before, because the internet has taken over everything. And the corporate spyware always looks slicker, and its UX is better, and it stays one step ahead, and most people don't care and take what they're given.

But the reality is that things have never been better, if we can accept that we will not have the cutting-edge convenience of Big Tech's options.

And of course we have to stay on our guard over certain red lines. I'd say the most urgent red line is the web, which is the world's de-facto open software platform. We need to defeat Google's evil plans for it, at all costs. That one is existential, but for the rest I'm fairly optimistic.

I don't think individual action like changing browsers and operating systems is gonna work anymore at this point. By its very nature only a minority of nerds will do it.

We either need to build a complete alternative to the internet as we know it, or to borrow a page from our commie friends and pressure collectively for political change.

A handful of nerds taking the time and effort to switch to FOSS are not going to make a dent, we have to force them to play fair, or change the game completely.

The enshitification has started right when smartphones came about. I bet most of the these anti-user trends could be traced back to smart phones. and none could have been started on PCs .

Now you can't even have a bank account if you want to use a privacy respecting device. third parties are dictating what and how to use our own devices. and its is very disgusting that masses have been sleep walking into this just for the meer satisfaction of going viral on tiktok and to have a thousand friends on Facebook and insta0

i wouldn't say graphene or calyxOS are difficult to setup. The instructions are pretty straight forward.

As someone who always wanted to learn Tor but never took the leap; What happened to make it unusable?

Add monero to your list as people who respect privacy need money that respects privacy too.

This isn't the last stand. This is the latest stand. While this fight might seem the biggest, never forget it's not the last we'll have to take part in. If this fails, they'll keep coming with some new idea later on down the road in order to deny us our right to privacy. Don't give up. Keep giving them hell every step of the way.

GrapheneOS setup is very easy, anyone who can follow a manual is able to do it.

I try to never use the word "hate" because I believe it's way too much for things that I simply dislike a lot.

But I HATE the average joe.

What's the consensus on https://www.privacyguides.org/en/ and https://www.privacytools.io/ ? I was always just using privacytools' recommendations, but then discovered that the original people behind it somehow split into privacyguides, and both sites have almost entirely different recommendations.

So, which one to believe?

👉 Top of All Time on /fossdroid

Firefox on android isn't really all that great. Use a freed soft fork like mull

Trying? It's a little late to do anything about it now. The internet is controlled by like 5 companies right now.
It didn't pan out the way it was intended. They came in a scooped everything up. Even the sites not owned by them are most likely running in their datacenters.

I've started moving over some of my services from Google to Proton now. Using my own domain so a switch in the future is as simple to do as changing the DNS. It's something I can recommend everyone.

Too bad I can't get my work to switch from Google.

What do you mean tor is not usable on normal internet anymore?

A lot of these services have a network effect. Being the only user on the platform doesn't create any value. You need to have someone on the other side to interact with. I was able to get my entire family using Briar as an SMS replacement. I'm working on a few ideas for networking people who want to use Briar with each other so we can have private forums for an array of interests.

Another idea I thought of was copying static websites (won't work for websites that are a service) and then putting them out there as a .onion website using OnionShare. I think it would be a good idea to create sites that are lists of .onion sites or add them to Ahmia (http://juhanurmihxlp77nkq76byazcldy2hlmovfu2epvl5ankdibsot4csyd.onion/) for people to find.

We might not be able to build a web that looks like the web of today but we can build one that's on par or better than what existed in the 1990's. In a lot of ways, that could be a very good thing.

I think that privacy thing is done. The only thing that keeps being a resistance are non-capital orientated networks. But the majority is not interested in such.

If people who are smarter and more capable than me really care about communal privacy and respect, I think the best thing that could happen is for all relevant non-user friendly apps, services, OSs, etc. to have their benefits ported into new applications that are as pleasing and easy to use as Windows and Mac. I love Linux and Debian tools, but trying to do anything on one of those systems feels like being forced to learn Chinese; therefore I can't recommend them to my friends and family. Which, after going down the rabbit hole, is depressing to say the least.

Yes its true. Privacy through a VPN doesnt work often as sites secretly block the proxies. You are no longer anonymous, or you need to use your own server and thats fingerprintable.

I am not so worried. Metaphysical reasons aside, why can't a proxy do what needs to be done?

There is 0.0 things that can stop an edge proxy that appears trusted from the proxy on out, and but is doing what the end-user wants from the proxy on in. At some level, network traffic is physical...once data enters the physical realm, it is the end-user's data.

The irony is...if the information was that important & valuable, it could be printed and purchased by consumers, you know, like...it used to. lol.