I don't know how to talk to regular people about the state of the internet. like, even in the unlikely event that I can overcome all the propaganda and convincingly convey how and why the slop peddlers are so bad, what am I supposed to tell somebody without a fedi-user level of technical proficiency to DO about it? "stop using google" isn't meaningful without providing an alternative, and I don't think anything that requires a bunch of messing around in settings menus to be useable is gonna work
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2
@InfiniteNutshell yeah it... feels so important and does not have good answers
Long
@chrisamaphone
It's rough. What seems to work for me and my mental health is to take the small wins...
I've had a couple versions of this conversation with my partner. It was a mixed bag. He still uses some genAI (his justification is that him making increasingly absurd werq room entrance lines and getting genuine joy from that isn't comparable to companies using it to replace their workers and this timeline is already too full of putting on individuals that which is significantly more the responsibility of the companies producing these things)
BUT he uses signal and got rid of messenger
BUT he deleted his Facebook
AND he's generally on the lookout for alternatives to things now because hes seen that sometimes the swap isn't as scary as you think
So silver lining, it's not futile, it's just unlikely to find a good match for every use case... at least until enough people (or collectives) build alternatives that are viable for them. So now my approach is more .. be happy about the small changes and encourage them to keep going... The state of the Internet (and computing in general rn) is just so depressing tho
@InfiniteNutshell
It's rough. What seems to work for me and my mental health is to take the small wins...
I've had a couple versions of this conversation with my partner. It was a mixed bag. He still uses some genAI (his justification is that him making increasingly absurd werq room entrance lines and getting genuine joy from that isn't comparable to companies using it to replace their workers and this timeline is already too full of putting on individuals that which is significantly more the responsibility of the companies producing these things)
BUT he uses signal and got rid of messenger
BUT he deleted his Facebook
AND he's generally on the lookout for alternatives to things now because hes seen that sometimes the swap isn't as scary as you think
So silver lining, it's not futile, it's just unlikely to find a good match for every use case... at least until enough people (or collectives) build alternatives that are viable for them. So now my approach is more .. be happy about the small changes and encourage them to keep going... The state of the Internet (and computing in general rn) is just so depressing tho
@InfiniteNutshell
