^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.
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.
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.
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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.
By “self hosting” do you mean serving apps from your own computer, where that computer is always online so you can access your own apps from the net on a client machine? Even when you’re at work or out in the city?
At that point the computers is promoted (or enslaved depending on pov) and called a (home) server.
One nuance. You don’t need to provide access from outside your home network if you don’t want to open the ports, i prefer that most of services remain local for security anyway. Once those ports are open, you or anyone else can connect to the services using your_external_ip_address:portnumber
You also dont need to run it 24/7, i started with a minecraft server that ran on planned times only, then a system that was online during afternoon-evening but not at night-morning.
It is also possible if not recommended, to use a vpn to tunnel in your network and than you can access everything just like if you where at home from anywhere.
If it all sounds intimidating, a laptop to try things out will do fine. Don’t expect a perfect polished system on first try, i have redesigned my network from scratch multiple times over the years. If you do want to get serious there are plenty of offices that have “old” desktop servers with pretty impressive hardware, the fans may make a lot of noise though.
The Hardware in my current home server is mostly parts that got upgraded in my main pc. I have reached a point where i am willing to sometimes spend extra money on what my partner sometimes dubs “my second pc” but it is also doing a lot for us at this point. Much cheaper then a store-bought NAS.
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?
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.
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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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
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.
