I've long been uncomfortable using platforms that have a bad reputation with respect to:

1. Human rights / genocide
2. Disinformation
3. Privacy

All three of those can be connected with advertising revenue, among other things. When I use platforms that are shady in this regard, I know I'm colluding with them and contributing to the problems they create. So it's been a relief to see new platforms like Tildes emerge, as well as those based on ActivityPub.

But even platforms that don't have overt advertising (Telegram?) do have a problem with hate groups that go unchallenged. And I know that if I was running an instance of an ActivityPub compatible platform such as KBin, I mightn't be able to keep on top of moderating things like disinformation.

So I suppose my question is, where do you draw the line? I've deleted my Twitter and Meta accounts and I'm exploring alternatives, but I'm not sure if I'm going from the darkness to the light, or just into shades of grey.

Rewind yourself back by about two decades from now when the Berners Lee basic protocols like HTTP and HTML were just being formed and the internet as we know it was just being prepared (those who weren't born can also visualize it as enough documentation and information exists).

What a world of opportunities it was and what a promising future. It felt you could do almost anything with the help of this new technology, irrespective of your race, gender, caste, creed, religion and even social status.

The promise of the information superhighway was that an ordinary pleb will have as many opportunities as those at the top, isn't it? Do you think that promise has been fulfilled today? Do you think we have made at least decent use (if not the best possible use) of this technology?

Now, I'm not saying everything is in doom and gloom, far from it as computing power has enabled the masses to do lot's of things they could only dream of in the 1990s! Opening your smartphone in the middle of a street and having a video call with a friend was like a fantasy dream in those days (at least for the ordinary pleb).

There are many other great achievements too like cheap hardware which is light years ahead (relatively speaking), apps that let you control all aspects of your lives from finances to health to work in a matter of a few taps.

But on the other hand, we have let a few large entities thrive and create massive monopolies on these very technologies we happen to use. Efforts at open source and digital rights and freedoms took on until about late 2000s but then started fading. Today, we have those very entities which are trying to curb user's freedoms heading and/or controlling organizations like OSI, Linux Foundation, Mozilla Corp., Red Hat, etc. which are supposed to act like stewards of our digital freedoms. The situation today is very gloomy in the sense that many of the digital freedoms that our predecessors fought for are on the verge of getting lost today at the hands of surveillance capitalism and we (as collective society of humans) are responsible for it.

Can we take an oath today to make as much ethical use of technologies like internet as possible? To act in as much a manner as possible that preserves the digital rights and freedoms of the common individual or pleb in the society like you and me?

I believe that's the only progressive and better path for humanity.

For the past few years, I've grown more and more uneasy with Amazon's business practices. I think it's time to move on. Not to mention the declining quality in products since international shippers were added (as discussed in the podcast Reply All).

I'm addicted to the convenience of 2 day shipping, even though we use Amazon less and less, I like knowing I have that option.

I've been considering a Costco membership instead - how does their online shopping and shipping times/prices compare?

I've also considered using Jet more but I don't know much about their ethics, does anyone?

Open to other alternatives and discussion about business ethics here.