There was a golden age when computers were something you owned, not like before when they were big machines your employer or university would give out access to, nor like after when they went to the cloud, you bought what was essentially a thin client and every software became a service.
At least in the olden days the computers weren’t forced into every single damn part of society!
Now in order to talk with most of your friends and family, you have to sell your soul to every one of the thousand ToS’s. It’s impossible to meaningfully use your personal device you bought with your own money without the internet, as every app and their mom needs to call home for some reason. For some reason, it is morally acceptable for a company to prevent you from being able to have someone you pay to replace parts of your device with third-party components you bought with your own money!
Now, of course, you can simply install some Libre operating system and use Lemmy, or Mastodon or whatever. But computers are so embedded into society that it is simply impossible to go without these services unless you want to get yourself isolated (and potentially in trouble with the authorities).
Besides, from prior experience, most people are unwilling to use technologies unless it is physically placed in front of them, whether through social influences, advertising or word of mouth, which generally corporate services do better than Libre alternatives.
It used to be that computers and programs were made for the end user. Now they are simply tools for ad and data-collection companies to extract every byte of personal data and force every second of advertising on others.
I’ve been seriously considering to remove computers from most aspects of my life, but as paper slowly disappears from our lives, this becomes harder and harder. Now you would likely be fired if you refused to use Teams or Slack or whatever your company uses. No one uses fax or writes mail or watches live TV anymore.
The only other alternative is to take back computers and make them personal again.
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But computers are so embedded into society that it is simply impossible to go without these services unless you want to get yourself isolated (and potentially in trouble with the authorities).
Lol what?
“If you don’t use Mostodon or Lemmy you might get in trouble with the law!”
Sorry, I meant services like online form application or something
The worst part is the banks. You have to get lucky to be allowed to use online banking without agreeing to some sucky TOS.
I hope I live to see the death of private banking. It’s insane how much of the fuckery in the world that originates in banking.
The internet, in particular social networking, needs to become personal.
I fleshed out an idea for building a personal social infrastructure system that will hopefully accomplish just that, but haven’t put “code to disk” yet.
As time passes it’s becoming more clear that this is ultimately the right way forward, but it’s a big project.
Check out freetheinter.net and send me some feedback :)
Waitwaitwait what am I looking at here? It seems to be fairly similar to the concept of the Fediverse. Could you explain it?
It’s intended to be much more local and decentralized than the fediverse, under the assumption that over time large fedi instances will exhibit the same issues as large centralized social networks (profit seeking, manipulation, etc)
- Instead of many people connecting to the same server, people only connect to people’s devices that they know
- It uses the resources of users “daily driver” devices for hosting
- It leverages “real life” personal connections and trust to deny access to large centralized entities
This sounds a lot like Circles
Sounds really cool! So it’s essentially “serverless” in the sense that it runs on users’ devices right?
I mean, it sounds cool if you don’t understand why servers exist…
A decent percentage of Gen X and early millennials grew up familiar with computers. You kind of had to be, to some extent. Stuff didn’t always work smoothly or easily, so some tinkering and understanding of how things work beneath the surface was required.
We’re moving towards a future where a computer becomes just like an appliance, like a TV. Both the hardware and software will be locked down and set up to work. You just tap and press buttons to get it to do its thing.
Eventually, we may even get to the point where computers are required to be locked down “for our safety”.
If we get that far, then I can imagine those who want to build their own and have full freedom to install and customise it any way they want could be considered the very fringe/fanatical elements of society.
“Hey, you want an illegal unauthorised computer, why on earth would you need that, are you a terrorist or criminal or something?”
I hope things don’t go quite that far. But I don’t think it’s out of the question.
I don’t know, maybe there’s a healthy medium? My home computing is still very personal.
I will hang out on IRC with friends, while I hack away on my low-tech coding projects in the background.
My smart phone is primarily used for comms and navigation, and I’m not stuck to it out in public.
I refuse a smart home, and the only mindless automation I take part in is dedicated to movies and TV.
Circling back around, I do feel like not all hope is currently lost.
I get what you’re saying, like being forced to use whatever the society/work tells you to do. I do experience this sometimes.
But I don’t think I can replace computers as a whole. I can replace social medias (would happily do that in a jiffy) and get into social interactions, but I do watch lots of movies, YT videos etc… and I need them for these. Luckily there are libre frontends and high seas for most of my needs. And I rarely see ads now a days, thanks ublock!
You can use these privacy frontends, ad blockers, VPN connection to block most of the annoying tracking. As for work related thing I am with you.
I hear what you are saying, but I’m not sure why you aren’t doing what you want to do.
If you have a computer not provided by work, why do you have Slack or Teams?
Use ad blockers and/or Pi-Hole to avoid pesky ads.
Watch live TV.
Write a letter.
Stay away or use sparingly, data hungry services.
I know I feel better for it and I don’t feel as if I’m missing much.
I’m mostly concerned about the general public as many are either ignorant or lack the knowledge on how to use these.
Ads have become the new normal
Ads have become the new normal
I haven’t seen an ad in ages on the internet. Also, ducks in the park are free.
What are you blathering about, it’s never been cheaper or easier to have a personal computer than now, however you define it. You can go full paranoid from coreboot up or you can just get a steam deck and dock and have a nice arch in desktop mode. You can meaningfully use it with internet, Firefox with ublock origin, Signal to talk to your family without selling your soul or whatever. Is this written by a chatbot?
You are not wrong but OP also is lamenting that normies won’t do it due to how social order is structured. Not much to do about it besides educating people around you.
You aint convincing boomers that privacy is a right that you have to protect. But younger folks are one shiti event from being believers and we got a lot of shit floating down our way.
Critical mass should hit in like a generation or two!
I’ve been ranting about this a lot lately, but as the owner of mspencer.net (completely useless personal domain, but is 199 days older than wikipedia.org for what it’s worth)…
There is sort of a way to do that, but it’s still labor intensive so not a lot of people do it. Movements to investigate are homelab and selfhosted. Homelab equipment is old (extra power-hungry for the capability you get) or expensive. Self hosting requires a bunch of work to stand things up the way you want it.
Biggest barriers to self hosting - or hosting through your nearest nerdy relative - are the following:
Free ad-supported offerings (with the privacy and terms and conditions impacts you describe) are better and easier, so they out compete DIY options. If a nerdy family member offers to host forums and chat for your community club or whatever, the common response isn’t gratitude, it’s “That’s stupid, I’ll just use Facebook.” Without that need and attention, volunteer projects get way fewer eyeballs and volunteers are way less motivated.
Security is difficult to figure out. Project volunteers have enough on their plate just helping users get their stuff working at all. Helping novice users secure their installations is so much extra work.
Many volunteers feel taken advantage of if they produce something that could help companies make money better, when they don’t share any of the money they make through donations or support arrangements. Similarly, many open source projects get taken over by for-profit companies who diminish efforts to make their open source offerings easier to use for free. (They want companies to buy support contracts, even if it means frustrating use by private individuals without kilobucks to spare.)
but is 199 days older than wikipedia
Oooh, the celebs started showing up on Lemmy!
s/celebs/weebs/
Fixed :-)
Counter-point: why would want to own and maintain something like a computer? I want a simple device that take no thought and can be replaced with zero effort.
Ahh, a game of devil’s advocate. There’s no reason why a Libre product with sane defaults can’t do this either.
I’m not sure it’s devil’s advocate: I work with computers for 40 hours a week. There’s no way that I want to put any effort into a computer in my personal time
There are distros that do just that - exist without bothering you.
there are no distros or combinations of software that come close to what mac/iphone/apple tv provide even WITH effort; let alone without. they have other benefits, but ease of integration is not one of them
IDK, iPhones might be easy when you’re using them in relatively narrow usecases, but ridiculously hard or even impossible to use in certain way. Your bank gets sanctioned and its apps removed from App Store? You need to go to the bank’s office and do a dance with a tambourine. Want adblocking in your browser? There is none, only some DNS solutions. Want an adless Youtube client with extended functionality? Too bad. Not to mention that Apple ecosystem would not even be a point of reference for most, as most would be unable to afford this all.
you’re completely right, but only bank sanctions are relevant to the majority of people, and really are bank sanctions relevant to most people???
however, that wasn’t the point you were making in your original comment
My point was that if you want something slightly outside of what Apple wants - something as basic as a Youtube app - it becomes “a ton of effort and potentially impossible”. A custom Android OS would indeed face more trouble than a stock Android/iOS (like with bank apps, again), but I was thinking more about desktop Linux, which would just exist without arbitrarily bothering you.
Also bank sanctions are rare but are applied to a ton of people simultaneously, which is also the case when an average person can find themselves at odds with their own phone.
Gotta find it, install it, update it occasionally etc. cloud services don’t need that.
Are we maintaining computers?
I haven’t had to do anything beyond installing the OS after a hardware update or installing software for over a decade. Yeah, I’m lazy and using Windows, but my last hardware was used for about 7 years without needing any troubleshootijg and I upgraded a few years ago to keep up with modern games.
I guess I clean the filter sometimes.
Counterpoint: before Gmail, I ran my own mail server and futzed with Mutt for a perfect email experience. It was a frustrating time sink.
Gmail came out and I now get a better end-user experience with virtually no cost of ownership. I’m comfortable with the ad-supported model. I’d prefer a low monthly fee, but not so much that it’s worth moving to Proton. Eventually, maybe I will.
I get this take, but it isn’t for me.
Now you would likely be fired if you refused to use Teams or Slack or whatever your company uses.
Why would I refuse? It’s company software running on company hardware. It isn’t my problem what the ToS is.
I personally am migrating accounts and contacts from my gmail address to my own domain set up with Zoho. Pretty cheap for the yearly subscription and I like knowing that my nail is not with an advertising company.
but not so much that it’s worth moving to Proton. Eventually, maybe I will.
FYI, it takes years to do such a move, so there is benefit of starting now and just slowly rolling it over.
