^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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
You need to host Jellyfin on your own server. For example, you can get a micro pc and attach a hard drive to it with N terabytes of your legally acquired movies and tv shows.
Getting it working right is a pain (I keep running into problems where it stops working, or the metadata is wrong, it forgets how to access the drive, and so on). You also need to ensure it has an IP address to access it from afar, and set us SSL encryption if you want secure access from afar. Expect to put aside several hours to set it up, and then several more to fix it when it breaks inexplicably days or months down the line.
Then you can connect to it from your browser directly or via the jellyfin app. Apple TV even has a jellyfin app, so I can watch from my parents’ TV setup. You can set things up so that different users can access different shows even.
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.
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.
except there absolutely is. I live in what used to be a literal forest with a road through it and now its smog and tire dust the moment yoy open a door or window.
Urbanisation and deforestation are not the same as enshitification tho.
It’s a bit unfortunate that “increased degree in which something is shit” sounds like what the word should mean, and I suppose it then sort of does.
It’s nice to have a word that describes the investor-driven incentives to worsen a service/product to milk out more short-term revenue. The larger a market capture is, the more that can be pushed without an alternative being a threat.
It’s the cycle of “provide a good quality service that makes everybody happy” -> market capture -> shareholders push for increase revenue at the expense of quality as there is no competition.
I left a lot out but I think overall it still counts. this formerly middle of nowhere town grew too big due to high end highrise projects and everyone wanted to live in lovely little forest tower with a view but making the car and bike infrastructure able to support the additional homes isn’t profitable so getting in and out is bottlenecked massively, local businesses have been replaced by more housing projects so you have to go farther to get food and stuff.
so basically once upon a time nothing was here and you had to drive out far to get anything. then the town picked up over several decades and you didnt have to go anywhere because everything was there. then they got rid of everything and brought in more people so you have to drive again but now in traffic, all to line the pockets of mainly two companies’ execs.
I wish I agreed with this, but every day more forests and fields are knocked down to make room for more shitty subdivisions in my area. The few farmers that have held out and still use their land on the middle of the city are heroes, but I know that within a few decades they will slowly dissappear, as the farmers die and their kids cash in on that appreciated land.
For mail, moving is already possible. DMA requires whatsapp/messenger to interoperate with other services. ( still facebook… aargh )
I dont think paying money is the answer. But it may make sense for some people in some cases.
For example: for someone who uses gmail… switching to protonmail is a huge leap. And donating money(or buying service) is a way to ensure that it remains sustainable and continues to grow.
I’d start with ublock origin for browser extensions, and then add more things based on what you’re looking to do :)
You’ve already mentioned a few, but another might be to explore alternatives to the bad services and start a process to migrate over. That can look like anything from reducing your dependence on a service to moving over entirely.
ex. unfollow people and things you don’t care about
