Very nicely put. I've used all this for deep reflection about my internetting as well and I don't think I have come to terms with everywhere being ruined by corporate. It's not like they don't fuck us over as well in the real world and I now realize what kind of fight we're in on- and offline. Don't want to give up any bit of space to evil corporations. I think it's easy to create really quiet Lemmy instances (or other social sites, federated or not) where one can rest from all those aggressive algorithms, and if I do it at some point I will make it very connected to real life and good for information gathering. Other than that, I like real life, I'm not interested in much virtual stuff.

12k views but probably 10k are bots and the others are too busy scrolling to ever use your knowledge. And then your content is buried on someone else's platform. I think reddit (and lemmy for that case) are horrible for keeping and spreading useful information and I wonder why people see them as the best alternative.

These products - Googles convenience products as well as the Social Media shite - were introduced gradually at the time. The single steps people took towards using these products seemed innocuous. Before you know it, your whole life is enmeshed in a privacy nightmare and the convenience and quality you were used to is gone. It's like buying an apartment in a nice place of town and then within the next two decades the area turns into a shady ghetto slum.

I thought the very idea was to not chase the profit? Free and open means that everybody profits.

Parent here. I am terrified of roller coasters. I'm a DIY and tech person, and I can see how shoddy they are built and maintained. I did however let my kid ride in them when we went to one of them awful parks (grandpa invited us, kid was still young and excited). Kid had the time of his life, I died a thousand times (I tried out the milder ones myself and watched kid ride the bad ones).

Obscure/Folder/With/Beware/Of/Jaguar/Tag

Nooooo you must buy zillion separate device from company. Don't forget a few adapters because obviously nothing is ever compatible. And every few years: let's invent a 'new' thing and have everyone upgrade their devices!

First ever pics inserted into Lemmy, hope that works. Behold, the redneck mouseboard. Has a height adapter to work from sofa or desk, because the only ergo that really works well for me is changing my position often. The keys on my board are made to be super light, because the only version I found at the time had really heavy keys and it was awful. I slaughtered a cheap mouse and 3D-printed the thingies that hold the mouse-buttons and scroll wheel in place. Scroll wheel has stopped working unfortunately (tiny plastic wheel shaft broke). But the keys work great. I have assigned the middle one to do certain things in my translation workflow, but would like more keys. Which in my current very limited understanding means "add more mice". But there might be more elegant ways, maybe you good people could help.

Makes me laugh. Amazon eating itself. All the internet giants slowly eating themselves, by the power of AI. Beautiful to behold.

I was trying so much to get rid of that shit. No luck, everyone and their dog only knows of Whatsapp and will not use other apps

Thanks for your detailed explanation. The IPFS seems to be run by one guy also involved in something cryptocurrency, that looks a bit fishy to me. (Just a personal first impression by me, who has no clue and might be all wrong). From quickly looking into both I would probably prefer sth like git, as it has been around for longer. How is git not decentralized - as I understand, with git the files are stored on several machines and everyone can make and commit changes? I might still be struggling to understand the whole concept of decentralized here. Github is owned by Microsoft apparently and I won't touch their stuff unless I really have to.

Sometimes between age old protocols and new stuff popping up I completely lose direction. So to track changes we can use RSS, but also Git, but also blockchain. Do people just come up with new stuff to do old things or is the new stuff better in at least some occasions? More stupid questions of a person who likes tech but is not an IT pro...

So someone above mentioned Git, would that be comparable to how IPFS works?

No matter Games and Fandom wikis have enshittified the wiki movement, but I think we can and should revive or create a new wiki movement for practical stuff, like gardening, cooking, woodworking, animal care etc. A lot of that used to be on forums (not the most ideal form of storing knowledge) and then most of it disappeared on Facebook. Not sure it it's still there, the fb got too shitty, had to leave. Went to reddit, and at first it was okay, but more tech and less practical oriented. It was noticeable that from forum to facebook to reddit, information density and quality about certain topics had declined. So I believe that a mature internet use would be to avoid those platforms like the plague. Aynthing valuable, especially our valuable community efforts, our hobbies and favourite activities, has to be kept out of corporate hands. When I started to save my photos on Google and contact my family on Facebook all those years ago it was just convenient. I don't think we had any idea about the can of worms this all was. Now I feel like a recovering drug addict, but it's worth it for a better web.

This. My problem is mainly about ownership and the control that comes with it. I don't want a knowledge repository (no matter if about breeding budgies or world politics) to be in the hands of a few. It has just happened: the evil site we don't want to talk about has imploded, and whatever information people find there now might have been tampered with in one way or another - those who decide to leave a rotting online portal also leave the accumulated knowledge behind that is stored on the site's servers. To always retain access to content we create online we need to rethink the whole thing. No matter if it's a social media portal, a photo sharing site, a music sharing site ... for example, who owns Discord and what will happen when that turns to shit? Another few years of content saved per disaster recovery or lost forever?

Git seems to be a good way to approach this. It's funny that I never really had to get around to what Git actually is (some thingy to store files for programmer teams?). For a somewhat technophile but non-IT person it's all a bit overwhelming.

All you guys think fandom type wikis. I am thinking about practical knowledge. A wiki about donkey care can very well need a quick link to a wiki about medicinal plants, and wikis about adjacent practical topics, or think for example car tuners and motorbike tuners - they might like to have different wikis but will have lots of similar or equal topics. Wouldn't a federated wiki mean it can be better protected from attempts of centralized censorship?

This is what I mean. Lots of small wikis, like subreddits, like the old forums, only that a wiki setup seem to me a better way to collect and present knowledge than the forums, mailing lists, facebook groups, subreddits or wherever we used to put our stuff.

What does the 'blockchain' component do? Not sure what it means compared with a regular platform.

Sounds cool. Does that mean we need heavy disks full of data everywhere or is there a magicky way around it?