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  • Use tech and services outside the big tech. Just Fedi over standard social. Use Peertube instead of Youtube.

    Run Firefox.

    Set up your own servers for yourself or start a community. Matrix, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.

    Run SearXNG as your search or help others by hosting.

    If you can work of free and open source code that helps decentralize and give the power back to the people or create something new. Even if you can code, learning a project and helping others with it or helping create docs, etc.

    Spread the word, but don't be annoying. Help less technical folks get decentralized.

    It's very difficult and can be disheartening, but you don't have to cold turkey all of it. Each drip in the bucket helps until we're all united and become a tidal wave.

    When all the power is centralized that's when those central players think they can do whatever they want.

  • There's a lot of good comments and suggestions, but the one that I'm not seeing is, "tell others".

    Do you perform support for friends and family members? Explain why it's not in their best interest to use Chrome (and Google products in general), then ask and help them to install and use alternatives.

    Have a laypersons response to why they should avoid Google for that person you're chatting with on the bus. Have a response ready to the awful, "but I don't have anything to hide" counterargument. As an aside, being the tin foil hat wearing guy/gal doesn't help the cause, explain it in plain language.

  • I always wonder… can a truly open and free new internet be built? What would be the options in doing something like this? Maybe running on existing hardware (fibre, towers etc.) to a certain extent…

    • I'm gonna argue 'no'.

      Sure, we could do something clever with mesh network access points, or use tunneling (VPN) to build a pocket network on top of the existing Internet (TOR does something generally like this to create a more anonymous Internet). So if this were simply a matter of infrastructure, the tech is already there.

      However, there are two problems. The biggest problem is adoption. What service can our little pocket network provide that would convince the lay person to tap into such a network? How are we going to advertise this to others? Even if we had our own copy of the current internet's infrastructure, we would have a cool webpage and spread by word of mouth and they would still have advertising dollars. Either we need a killer feature (that they can't simply replicate) or else they'll just win over the average person by the pillow talk of advertising bucks.

      However there's also a philosophical problem. To create a open internet, it has to be available to everyone and our problem is that includes the asshole corporations we don't like. The fundamental nature of an internet is to be an interconnected network. By building our own separate network, we're fundamentally creating a walled garden network, not an open network - it's essentially defined by who we're keeping out.

      But I'm not going to leave you without a solution. Here's the framework of what I think we need to do to fix the internet†:

      • We need to stop treating internet access like a consumer good. It needs to at least be treated as a utility, i.e. as something that has an inherent monopoly and doesn't self-regulate through the process of supply and demand - there is only one internet, no substitute exists. Heck, I'd argue that internet access should be a human right, a tool that fulfills a basic need for connection and communication.
      • We need to restore network neutrality, ISPs need to be content neutral, because if they can pick winners and losers, they'll make private deals and pick the winners that work best for them (often another branch of themselves). Since we lost network neutrality formally in the USA less than a decade ago, the internet still looks kinda mostly open, but it's eroding slowly.
      • We need to separate ownership of the physical network equipment from the ownership of the information services. Let's call these 'equipment ISPs' and 'general access ISPs'. The physical equipment should be owned and maintained by small companies, ideally with about 5-10 field technicians (the physical footprint that covers will vary based on the setting, dense urban settings will need more companies than sparse rural ones). These small equipment ISPs will not be allowed to negotiate directly with the consumer. The Access ISPs will be the ones that will lease an IP address to the general public as well as basic services such as DNS, and will compete on general service quality (up/down/latency speeds) that they'll have to negotiate with equipment ISPs to ensure quality of service, access ISPs can also sweeten the pot with things like offering an email address or bundling with media services(e.g. Netflix), etc. Equipment ISPs should be expected to have deals with multiple service ISPs, and be prevented from having exclusivity deals. Ultimately, the goal is to allow the general public to have options about which ISP they choose that's not fundamentally limited by where they are at, and the service ISPs are then on the hook to work with the equipment ISPs to fulfill those promises. Equipment ISPs are being given a small monopoly, but if they perform shoddy there'll be neighbors on all sides to shame them, also they'll have to work with at least one or two access ISPs to have any income at all.
      • Start choosing people over brands. The biggest crime corporations perform against humanity is to take credit for the work that is ultimately done by unique, talented people, then internally treat people as fungible assets that can be let go once they're not useful. lemmy.world is administrated by @ruud and a small team of admins (check your instance's sidebar for more details). If @ruud and lemmy.world split and he created a new, different Lemmy instance, I'd follow @ruud to the new insurance because he's proved his talent at weathering the problems of keeping a service up and running in the modern internet, whereas lemmy.world … is just a domain name. Google wasn't nearly as evil when it was still run day-to-day by Larry Page & Sergey Brin. Valve rakes in money, but Gabe Newell keeps the company priorities on actually being a good game platform. By contrast Steve Hoffman is hated partially because it often feels his job is to be the face of an otherwise obscure board of directors and he serves them in a way that he doesn't serve his employees, the moderators, or the users in general.

      Overall, that's four things we can do. None of them are easy. One is on the global level, one on the national level, one on the state or local level, and one on the personal level.

      †I live in the USA, so my perspective is through that lens, but I'm trying to offer ideas that should generalize.

    • Yeah. This project doesn't go down as far as hardware, but it did take pains to make it as difficult as possible to extend it in bad ways: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

  • Don't be greedy if you are a dev or owner of a website, what you make should be always 100% free from ads and trackers. If you are an user dont give away money to this pigs, if you need something don't rush to amazon but check some local web market first.

  • I know it's not all that logical and would probably only end up making things worse, but stopping the google DRM thing by literally going to google headquarters and doing something similar to the January 6th Capital Hill attack in Washington DC.

    As long as you could get enough people to be quiet about it and form a large enough group, you could definitely perform a large scale attack on their HQ and as long as the info doesn't slip out, you can easily overwhelm them since they won't see it coming and won't have enough guards/police on site.

    The only thing is you have to hold the big corporate bigwigs hostage and make sure the negotiations end with either them being killed for their crimes against freedom or that all their services get shut down permanently and they get to live. Just be sure to slaughter as many employees as possible to show those bigwigs you mean business and aren't there just to have a tea party.

    The only way we are ever going to get the people in high places to listen is either through murdering them or scaring them so much that they listen to our demands.

    A similar scenario to this would be when actual Chinese citizens in China were protesting and essentially shouting in the streets for the government and Xi the Pooh to step down. Only difference is that if we started to disappear after all of this hypothetical situation, there would be cause for an even bigger spark as people would definitely start to wonder what the fuck happened and it would spread so much faster than these tech giants could censor. Everyone would be sharing links/posts/screenshots (both truthful and untruthful) as you don't just sit there wondering why a shit ton of the protesters/"domestic terrorists" just suddenly disappears in America (especially if you are a parent or close to one or more of them).

    Hell, you could even upload videos of what happened to sites Rumble or maybe Odysee and I can probably guarantee people there are gonna share and make that shit spread like wildfire since it probably won't be censored and taken down right away compared to if it was uploaded to yt, where it would disappear faster than the braincells of a newborn CEO.

    In summary, I am in full support of absolutely going full on French Revolution on the rich and recording it for future generations.

    • Make the people in charge pay. Those Washington guys, the top brass, the 1 percenters. The sooner we make them pay by any means necessary, the closer we are to getting a more just and fairer society. The world is merely one bad day from anarchy.

    • @AceFuzzLord i'm not even sure if the people who are against this is enough to form a revolt. As i stated on one of my comments, most of the users don't care whoever leads the way in technology until it affects them personally.

      • Then why not fabricate a few lies, like telling some absolute 2nd Amendment defenders that google is trying to impose bans on gun pictures being posted online or tell some extremely right-wing people that google is gonna make sure their news is banned off the internet if either group doesn't join?

        Hell, why not get the conspiracy theorist anti-vaxxers on our side by lying and saying that this new thing google is putting out will cripple your mind and make your children autistic through 5G? No offense to these people, but they are definitely the type to fall for these kinds of lies.

        A few lies to gather more support to save the internet is nowhere near as bad as these large corporations lying their asses off to take control over us.

114 comments