Who's winning here, exactly?

Google’s Web Enviroment Integrity API > this is dead now.

I believe decentralized social networks becoming more popular is what Aaron Swartz would have wanted if he saw how Reddit was being managed.

This wont amount to anything. Social media in general will die out, if you look at things people are going back to chats (Whatsapp and others) and Forums (reddit, lemmy etc) because those platforms are what actually deliver the core value. The chat problem was already solved in 1999 with the introduction of XMPP* and the forum problem, well we've had niche forums since ever and eventually got Lemmy.

* too bad big social media companies decided to fuck up and roll their own vendor locking garbage instead of just using XMPP in a open way like Cisco and others did back in the day.

I am seeing it as a net positive. Especially because of the Windows 12 bit, the more Windows is an inconvenience, the more will jump ship, and some will land on linux.

On a Operating system/free software level we're doing fine. Not great (still no true open source phone OS, Firefox has like 3% market share, lots of closed/unfixable hardware) but you can work and have fun using OSS and it's not going anywhere. On a global economy level we're as fucked as always. Big tech isn't going anywhere and 99% of people will choose convenience over ethics every single time. We're a minority here and always will be.

The core is the surveillance advertising, to create incommings with profiling and tracking user data, practiced by practically all large US companies. This is the underlying evil that must be eradicated, not only by putting the user's privacy in question, degrading him to simple raw material and merchandise, but also security by filtering sensitive data, such as medical and banking. This requires a deep review to eliminate it as a means of income for companies. With this, an important step towards a free internet is already achieved.

It is essential to educate users to ALWAYS read the TOS and PP of a software or service before using it, avoiding those who obviously share user data with third parties and looking for alternative products, which there surely are. It is the company's ethics regarding the user that is most important today. If there are more and more users who set these criteria, these companies will have to change or they will run out of users.

eg Google has excellent products that, from a technical aspect, are impeccable and many of them without a real alternative, it is their ethics regarding the user, which makes them unacceptable, this is the point and trying to tell people that, yes, the product is Good, but the price is your sovereignty, look for another one, perhaps not as complete, but it serves you the same and does not turn you into a simple product.

It is the user who determines the market, but only if they learn not to fall into the trap of big companies with products that shine so beautifully. It is the user who must determine what he needs, not the company.

Google didn't back off. They're going forward with it, but in smaller pieces. Their first piece is going after streamed and stored media, instead of the web as a whole.

How do you control a population? You take away their rights, one little piece at a time, so they don't notice the change. Same concept as how you eat an elephant: one bite at a time.

This time next year, the internet will be unrecognizable and massively corporate (more so than it is now), unless we, the internet population, fight back and win.

The future I want to foresee is one where everybody runs and keeps their data locally (or their dedicated VPS):

• where everyone has access to at least 10Gbps symmetric fiber optic connection to the internet at their home/apartment at affordable price (doesn't have to be unlimited, but pricing per TB of bandwith usage needs to be less than USD $1 as it is the actual cost of operating & peerage)
• whereas net neutrality is a prerequisite to any corporation/organization/government/municipality getting network backbone peerage with other network operators
• whereas registering to a website or service actually creates a local secure database/bucket/pod where that website/service organizes/sort/manipulates our data and stores all generated modified data/metadata within our local personnal server, every time we interact with that same external website/service it gets access to the database/bucket previously created. Look into the Solid protocol specification to get a better idea (it doesn't have to be that specific protocol)
• whereas FIDO2 or WebAuth or their successor is widely accepted for passkey implementation or just multifactor authentication
• whereas all communications are direct peer-to-peer without transiting third party servers (as in not managed by either communicating party)

Moreover, even better would be to teach everyone from elementary school various concepts (from simpler to more complex gradually) of science, programming, critical thinking and empathy.

If I may dare to push even further, with technology (secure authentication, work from home familiarity, collaborative softwares, digital signing, distributed version control), give every citizen (from the age of 12 or earlier; because one has to start learning early to make mistakes, understand and form good habits) the ability to vote/abstain on every proposition, motion, new/modified law and decision regarding their own country. Have a publicly accessible historical account of every vote by everyone (excluding secret ballots obviously). Most importantly, every year end, 4 years, 10 years, 25 years, 60 years have a collective review/retrospective of past motions/decisions that were implemented and let everyone vote on if those were overall beneficial or harmful for the country/state/municipality. Empower those who tend to regularly vote and tend to historically vote beneficially (at least 70% of their votes after they reached 25 years old) for the country/state/municipality to become a local representative.

I know it's getting wordy and perhaps a bit complicated but keep up with me. Give accredited/qualified individual in very specific fields the retractable/overridable power to have their votes on certain very specific motion/law/decision be inherited by active delegation by any other citizens up to a limit of ~290 (Bernard–Killworth number) per qualified inviduals. For example, a citizen could separetely delegate his/her votes:

• relating to healthcare to their own family doctor if they like/respect their judgment or even a familly member who is licensed for medical practice, it doesn't matter who as long as they are qualified for the subject matter
• relating to renovating a specific bridge to their neighbor who is a general contractor or their nephew who is a civil engineer
• relating to military procurement to their veteran uncle still with a sharp mind and keenly informed with world event or even their weekly indoor hockey teammate who is a unstoppable adventurer exploring every part if the world but also a office worker and a reservist

All while always preserving the option to change their vote anytime for any reason; by delegating to someone else for specific issue/concerns or voting on their own (always takes priority over delegation).

Well… I am being too hopeful and probably pushed things far beyond what is realistic, but it is nice to make thought experiments on what may be possible with technology.

Windows 12 is not going subscription. This was a bad take by a worse source (who apologized).

Stop spreading this shit!

Currently it certainly feels like OS is kicking the crap out of big tech in the AI space. Tech might have the money, but they don’t have enough brains to win the intelligence battle against the collective weight of nerds worldwide lol.

The future? Integrating AI in a way that spies on us even more than we've ever imagined.

I think decentralization is the key, but not necessarily these new fangled takes like the fediverse which have their own problems.

Just everyone build a damn site for yourself and if I want to know what Jeff Poff is up to I can go to jeffpoff.com and otherwise set up an rss feed for everyone I wanna keep up with. Community sites can cover needs for communities but otherwise why tf do I need Facebook for you to show me you went on vacation last month?

Except Reddit didn't fuck up, they pissed off a very vocal minority of people who couldn't give a shit less about privacy, the widespread pushback was about not using 3rd party apps, and not wanting to pay, it wasn't about privacy. It's never about privacy, and thats why we're in the spot we're in. We are less than the 1%. Most not only don't grasp privacy, but even when it's explained or shown to them what's happening, the tradeoff for "free" and convenience is well worth it to them.

I'm jealous of your optimism, but we had ONE mainstream breakthrough thanks to Cambridge Analytica that very briefly made the whole planet aware of what was going on regardless of the type of person they were, tech, non tech, teen, etc. Look how that ended, people don't care. Sadly, that being that way and us being the extreme minority may actually be in our favor though.

No way to predict the future but I have some hopes that people will be pushed to find decentralized open alternatives as companies squeeze harder and harder. It ultimately comes down to just how much the average person is willing to take.

Some people have philosophies and limits to just how how much they take from corporate overlords treating them as cattle, some just want their convinent entertainment/escapism and will tolerate just about anything. We will see just how many people still have standards and how many will continue to suck corporate cock for sweet sweet convinence until the end of time. It's also time for the tech nerds to scream to the heavens. A big issue with decentralized social services is that nobody knows about them. Those of us in the know need to do our part to shill and shill and shill. Everyone needs to know about searxng, peertube, Lemmy, the fediverse, public Access Unix servers, the Gemini protocol, the lot. The average person NEEDS to know that there are community run free services that they can turn to in the face of corpos squeezing harder and harder to take your money and reduce your rights.

In the worst case scenario and google fucks the whole internet, we can start again.

Huge advances in radio communication technology and cryptographic blockchains allow the ideas of a mesh based decentralized internet to be really possible.

Imagine a world where everyone has their own slice of the internet in the form of a mesh router that also host their personal homepage, and everyone has a continually updated copy of the whole internet locally. All built on open technology and protocols. The ISPs cut out. Once and done payment for the router box. A truly free internet unshackled from companies.

I think the TV series Upload is nailing a lot of the future we will all be in store for and how everything will be pay as we go and for those that can't pay, the fee free life is going to be pretty limited and full of ads for the little we can do.

Zerush, Stantana and Xavier said the things I wanted to say in this thread. But they missed the biggest point – localised data storage, combined with learning data archival and compression.

Avoiding non-selfhosted or unencrypted cloud storage is not just the most ultimate form of metadata reduction, but also the biggest guarantee of preserving your data. Of course, minimised (or no) dependence on Big Tech SaaS is a progression after that in terms of metadata reduction.

Remember, freedom is the most important aspect, then privacy, then anonymity and below all that is security. Why? Because security is always a moving goalpost, the others are not. Freedom, privacy and anonymity will continue to mean the same throughout time.

we will lose until big tech gets broken

money begets money is the cancer of the world

Metaverse never reached a state from which failure became an option.

I2P

I'm feeling positive, too. You can't undo the progres made in the decentralized network space. Every loss for big tech is a win for us. I don't hold much hope that decentralized networks are going to sweep the globe and return the internet to it's former glory. But I do think we'll always have a space, and that space can only get bigger.

Privacy is unironcally getting better, it's only bad because of the vulnerability in our current web design we're hardening against. Https and hello encrypt go a long way to hide our traffic, definitely not anonymous though. E2ee has never been as prevalent as it is now.

Corporations spying are obviously bad, but if it's possible, then it's inevitable that it was going to happen regardless and it's a good thing we're hardening our protocols against what was fundamentally a design flaw that would inevitably be exploited eventually.

Decentralization has never been nearly as popular or robust as it is now. I spend 90% of my social media on decentralized apps, which I could never say that before. My phone is as private as it has ever been with GrapheneOS.

Laws are getting more robust for privacy, some of the time anyways. Fascist laws in the name of "think of the children!" are trying to break encryption and privacy and are constantly a battlefield we need to be extremely vigilant over.

The clampdown is underway. If you don't know how to mesh you'll be gone in five years.

People are retarded and like being controlled. It's a bleak future

Devil's advocate:

Have you guys ever considered that the information these companies are making off of you just isn't that valuable? Your phone number, email, house address, skin color, sexuality, height, gender, fashion, job, and friends are not secrets. Anybody can know these things about you. We're on the Internet and web-based companies want to interact with people, if you don't like that go to a different website. But you'll never have a privacy agnostic internet experience because PEOPLE KNOW THINGS ABOUT EACHOTHER. That's one of the things about being people.

I remember reading somewhere (years ago, too lazy to find a source) that Google might take in $30/year off of a single Google user. That's absolutely pennies, that's not worth anything. Google only works because of their scale, and I bet a tiny drop in user activity of like 10% would destroy them. Most tech companies are just trying to make up more things to base promises on for their investors, those companies have no real value, they're all basically theoretical. So who cares? Just use them while you need it and if they fizzle out then all the data they had on us is worthless if not gone and the opensource community will step up like it always does.