Why/how are big instances a problem though?

Lemmy though. Where is Lemmy karma?

Acutally yes, but at the time I wasn’t able to afford all the equipment. By the time I was, I spent about 3-5 more years in this mode before CDs started to crumble

Not sure I understand. What do you buy from Google? If you want to degoogle, purchasing other stuff, or through channels other than the Play store is probably the simplest part.

Have you checked out the FuriPhone? First reports seem promising

Oh, getting your life tracked by Apple is better? Also didn’t know decentralised apps exist in Apple ecosystem

There are less cruel ways of killing a puppy than stoning it to death. Also, what’s the difference between welcoming and acclamating?

Here is some hope: You have a great job and you love the actual work! Some aspects of it are bullshit, some of the time at work you spend on mandatory bullshit, and bullshitters who detract from your happiness exist all around the world, in every industry. But: All that doesn’t completely cancel out the love you still have for your work - otherwise you wouldn’t have phrased it that way, would you? Also a slice of good news is, you have some degree of control over how much you let the shitty aspects cancel out the good things. Admittedly, the control is never 100%. And sometimes, the bullshit and frustration can get overwhelming and does have the power to tip the balance into a minus. That’s when it’s time to leave. Prepare to ge into a new, more rewarding field now. That will give you a choice when you feel the moment has come (probably it’s when you keep saying the above sentence to people in the past tense).

I need to make a meme out of this, combined with the situation when realized that I had already, unknowingly, made that decision to be broke more than twenty years ago when realized I’d make a great teacher, and started going down that career path.

Have you noticed how they react extremly slowly? That’s an explicit setting they make in CSS so rejecting them is sure to waste a lot of your time.

I actually sometmies consent to tracking cookies, when its the site’s primary source of revenue and they need to track my data to survive - like newspapers and other free online publications. But as soon as their cookie consent management comes up with this “legitimate interest” bullshit, I reject everything, just because eff you.

I observe the exact same thing in my parents - it’s as if they somehow can’t see some things on the screen, or lose the ability to comprehend written text, when it’s unexpectedly displayed on a screen. They always fixate on some irrelevant UI element, ignoring the one that’s currently important.

Tech support over the phone is torture. Especially when people don’t know what a home screen, a menu, a file manager or a browser, a tab is, that in order to leave an app you don’t have to close it and so on…

When I found out that my dad doesn’t know what the backspace key does on the PC keyboard. His whole life he’s only ever used the Del key and always positions the cursor to the left of text he wants to delete. He used to work at IBM for over 30 years and learned to program back in the day when computer code was printed on punch cards. But I’m pretty sure keyboards already had the backspace key back then.

Yeah, and I’ve never understood why that is. How come you have to build a custom hardware abstraction layer for each device separately on ARM chips?

Like the Nokia N900 did back in 2004 - except it was a real mobile OS (but fully yours)

Various XMPP clients are an inconsistent and hard to use ** mess, compared to the likes of Signal and Whatsapp

Element and Element X (curenntly using) are indeed buggy and I can xo firm that much. The sign-up and verification is, tbh anti-user, it’s an intransparent process with too many steps, too many pitfalls, and the ecosystem is never gonna gain traction with this as a flagship experience. Element X is sadly not doing better overall. The constant red or black or grey shield over each message, which one can never get to green somehow? Three kinds of verification codes/mechanisms to understand and manage? That is for nerds, as much as it pains me to say. Signal is not “for nerds”. The signup-process is not complicated. It’s not dead simple, but easy enough. But it’s a centralised service, all in the hands of a single entity. Enough said. Migrating to a new device is hell. It now also has account names, in addition to phone numbers. But please show me where it says you can officially create an account and use it without restriction, while never providing a phone number. An incredibly simple, one-step signon like here in Arcanechat? It’s the kind of stuff that the vast majority of users love. Nothing to think about, nothing to understand, just use. Secure, as in bot-proof? No idea, probably not.

It’s a generally recognised principle in economics that we want competition to take place, and for consumers to have a choice - for a plethora of reasons too large to list here. The most important IMO is a political one though: we don’t want monopolies for the same reason we don’t want monarchies and dictatorships. Being the sole provider of any very important product puts an obscene amount of power in the hand of a single corporation (or a handful of them). We never want that much power to be so concentrated in so few individuals, because it’s fundamentally injust, and always leads to catastrophe. Also consider that if that power is a corporation or a “private” individual, they’re not accountable to anyone but their shareholders (who, in turn never want the corp to be anything other than a money making machine). Even a dictator is more accountable to his subjects than a multinational corporation is to anyone. So there you have it, that’s why we need alternatives.

The meme makes it seem lime there’s some causal relationship though: because we tried to avoid big corp products and dampen enshittification, the alternatives we started to seek are going bad? I don’t think so. The world at large is going to shit in a general stream of shitfulness, but I don’t think we caused that development by trying to evade the shit.