I think most people would agree that the internet and technology in general have absolutely gone to shit over the past decade or so. There is no corner of the internet nor of the software world that hasn't been affected by enshittification. Everything exists to serve you ads. Everyone wants to extract as much money from you as possible. Every website is in a race for the bottom as they try to find the lowest effort content that makes them the most money. Every piece of software is pushed out half-baked and/or stripped down to the bare minimum with the rest paywalled or with the devs pinky promising to fix it 5 updates down the road.

Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of. And it's probably the one that's doing the best at the moment, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, all of them are just bots and propaganda and engagement farming the whole way down. And the worst thing is, they're complicit. Hell, they're actively encouraging it and trying to find ways to make it worse. And I have no doubt Reddit will bend the knee soon enough too (they just banned /r/whitepeopletwitter because Musk made a tweet critical of the sub).

There's probably some element of rose-tinted glasses here, but the old internet was just so much better looking back. Like, early 2000's to maybe 2012, 2013 or so, that was the peak. No colossal data harvesting schemes feeding into algorithms designed to keep you engaged on their site 24/7 for the purpose of shilling you advertisements and selling your data, no mass propaganda, no Dead Internet Theory (which can hardly be considered a theory anymore). Yeah there was shit content, there was tons of it, but I can deal with shit content and petty forum drama and whatnot; what I can't deal with is all the multi-billion dollar corporations trying to shape the entire landscape of the Web into the perfectly minmaxxed cash-generating machine that does as little as possible for as much data and advertising as possible.

Modern software isn't much better. Windows and MacOS are filled with anti-user features, telemetry you just can't turn off, Windows will often just install shit on your computer without telling you. They turn your computer into a walled garden, where you can do what you want as long as you play by their rules, but without giving you any real control over what your computer does. Yeah you can delete system files and brick your laptop if you feel like it, but anyone who's ever tried to permanently disable Windows updates will know that in the end you're not the one calling the shots: Microsoft are. And... Like, that's insane, right? It's running on my fucking computer, it's my CPU doing the work, I want to know what the hell it's doing and not just the parts it lets me see, and if I want it to do something different then I should be able to make it so.

I hate it all. I'm tired. I want out.

These are my problems. Here's what I've done about it so far.

• Obsessive privacy on the web. No Google services. Firefox with as much telemetry turned off as possible. Protonmail and ProtonVPN for everything (and I'm considering getting out of those too with the pro-Trump stances they've been taking recently). As minimal an online footprint as I can get, I make as few accounts as possible and I don't use shared or even slightly related usernames (my username here is an exception as it's my Reddit username, and no, it's not my real name), I delete accounts whenever I can and I GDPR request the services afterward. Virtual cards for online payments as much as possible. Will probably make a Javascript whitelist at some point too. Is all of this overkill? Yes. Why do I bother? Because fuck them.

• As little social media presence as possible. Real life necessitates some amount of social media interaction of course, I have Facebook and Instagram but use them exclusively for messaging. I often see people excluding Reddit from social media but I don't fully agree, even if it's not exactly in the category it still targets a lot of the same psychological weak points in us, encouraging doom scrolling and shaping our opinions through echo chambers and propaganda (it's always important to remember that echo chambers and propaganda you agree with are still echo chambers and propaganda). I still use Reddit admittedly, but I've tried to minimise my usage as much as possible and I'm shopping for alternatives.

• Free and Open Source software as much as possible. I'm all in on GNU these days. Yes, it's a massive pain in the ass. My job unfortunately requires some Windows-only software so I'm running a dual partition but I'm trying to get as much of my computer usage onto Linux as possible (I use Arch btw). Like I said above, it's my computer, if I can't control what it's computing then it stops being my computer, it's at best shared between me and all the developers of the proprietary software I have installed on it.

That's my rant. It's been a long time coming.

There are still things I'm looking to change, especially with how I use the internet. Getting rid of Reddit is the next big step for me, I think. I just can't be bothered with it anymore, but there is still something about it that I love, every time I look through a small niche topic community, or an interesting new hobby sub I've never seen before with years of cool posts for me to go through. And yeah, I do still enjoy browsing through /r/all even when it's 80% shit and objectively bad for my mental health. But at this point the overwhelming mass of utter shit is just not worth digging through anymore. I'm tired.

Tildes is really cool. It reminds me of the old internet, the ideal usage of the Web. I open the site, I see a link to an interesting article, I read it, I give it a like, I read and/or contribute to the discussion in a comments section. I want more of this.

If anyone has any links to cool sites that I should check out I'd greatly appreciate it.

Hello to everyone who's reading this post :)

Now LLMs are increasingly so useful (of course after careful review of their generated answers), but I'm concerned about sharing my data, especially very personal questions and my thought process to these large tech giants who seem to be rather sketchy in terms of their privacy policy.

What are some ways I can keep my data private but still harness this amazing LLM technology? Also what are some legitimate and active forums for discussions on this topic? I have looked at reddit but haven't found it genuinely useful or trustworthy so far.

I am excited to hear your thoughts on this!

As the years go by, I’ve become increasingly annoyed (I choose that word intentionally) at the thought that there’s some “record” of my activity on the Internet somewhere, which was probably put together by my ISP. I “don’t have anything to hide” (other than perhaps the one or other ROM or movie that I download), but I also don’t want to randomly get fined or put in prison if, in a few years, our governments decide to retroactively criminalize certain activities (I’m thinking mostly about piracy).

I’m not tech savvy though. That’s not because I haven’t tried. I have. I spent countless hours reading about how one can keep one’s activity on the Internet “private”. To my knowledge, it isn’t actually possible. I mean, even if I didn’t use my real name anywhere, or didn’t have any social media accounts (thankfully, I don’t), just the fact that I have to use an ISP to surf the web means that at least they are “spying” on me.

So, I’m approaching all of you wonderful, tech savvy people (rather than ChatGPT or a search engine) to ask you if there’s something that I’m missing, and if there is a way (preferably a fool-proof one) to stop my ISP (or “anyone” for that matter) from collecting data on my activity on the Internet (particularly when I download ROMs or movies, which is the only “illegal” thing that I ever do).

eBay is updating its privacy policy, effective next month (2025-04-27). The major change is a new section about AI processing, accompanied by a new user setting with an opt-out checkbox for having your personal data feed their models.

While that page specifically references European areas, the privacy selection appears to be active and remembered between visits for non-Europe customers. It may not do anything for us at all. On the other hand, it seems nearly impossible to find that page from within account settings, so I thought I'd post a direct link.

I'm well aware that I'm anomalous for having read this to begin with, much less diffed it against the previous version. But since I already know that I'm weird, and this wouldn't be much of a discussion post without questions:

• How do you stay up to date with contract changes that might affect you, outside of widespread Internet outrage (such as recent Firefox news)?
• What's your threshold -- if any -- for deciding whether to quit a company over contract changes? Alternatively, have you ever walked away from a purchase, service, or other acquisition over the terms of the contracts?

Hello everyone! I have been currently debating switching email providers. I have been with Proton for a few years now (free user), but I have become increasingly disappointed. Firstly, I am not exactly a fan of the “we have apps for everything” model, particularly the integration of a password manager is just strange and the crypto wallet feels a bit nauseating, as I have my reservations about cryptocurrency. Consolidating all of my services in a company such as Proton feels misguided if the goal is to avoid walled gardens from the tech giants. There are also some other more recent things that have come up in relation to Proton that just make me question the legitimacy of Proton's “guiding moral imperative” as a privacy focussed company.

Moving on from that, I have mostly settled on two options due to their

• low cost
• generally adequate security (I understand email's limitations on this front, I just want something to be secure enough)
• transparency reports
• location of operation

The main thing I am struggling with here are the pros and cons between the two platforms.

Posteo seems to be less ideal of an email provider because they do not support ARC and lack a good DMARC policy. BUT they claim to support encryption with their calendars, but does this even matter if you are accessing the calendars with CalDAV (which I do not beliece is an E2EE connection)?

I think I trust Mailbox.org more when it comes to security, but I think their contacts / calendar situation is somewhat worse, and their French translation seems … lacking in spots (not that it matters to me much, but still is somewhat jarring for me).

I could just ignore the contacts/calendar problem, and use something like EteSync, but that would become just another thing to pay for, and another app to operate (if I need to use the WebDav bridge).

Any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated, I am really hoping this inspires some interesting conversations! And of course, feel free to tell me about better options if I have overlooked something. Have a lovely day :)

This is a topic I keep revisiting. It's constantly evolving, with new laws in different parts of the world happening pretty often. And also there's a lot of grey area with vague or incomprehensive language that hasn't yet been tested in courts.

I recognize that it's a bit of a niche topic, but I think there are a lot of us at Tildes who have to think about it. After all it potentially impacts anyone maintaining or building a non-platform web presence. It also applies to less obvious things like running an advertising campaign that involves media requested from a server you control (which can therefore potentially log requests).

For my part, I've needed to research laws relating to PII in order to come up with policies and practices in various contexts. In broad strokes it's pretty simple but as you get into details what I continue to find is that there are a lot of conflicting opinions both from professionals and lawyers. A lot of it is still open to interpretation.

I'm wondering what kinds of experience other tildenauts have around data protection and PII? Have you implemented solutions? Do you wonder about it for your own websites? Have you been involved with it at companies where you've worked? Do you have questions about it?

I've gone down the rabbit hole of self-hosting, and I'm wondering if I should try self-hosting my blog. The blog is currently on Netlify. I've left it there because I figure their infrastructure is much better than mine... but part of that is a CDN, and, despite the performance benefits, I'm not thrilled about the privacy implications of subjecting my users to that. I'm torn on that point.

That said, I'm on cable internet, so my upstream is abysmal. My site is mostly text and the site is low traffic, so maybe it's not a problem. What do you think? What are some of the implications of self-hosting the blog that I'm not considering?

Edit: Wanted to clarify a couple of things I realize weren't clear in my original posting. I'm already self-hosting a few dozen services from home on my own hardware. Port 80 and 443 both work, and I'm already running a Caddy reverse proxy to proxy to the other services. My question is less about whether self-hosting is a good idea and whether I should be keeping my blog on Netlify for the reasons above. My biggest concerns are the privacy implications of keeping with Netlify and their CDN vs. the performance implications of losing the CDN and serving via a ~30Mbps upstream connection.

Thank you for all the comments so far!

Hey all!

So I was thinking of how when looking at privacy, having a platform being a walled garden (i.e. data not being found on search engines) can feel like a worse experience for what is regarded as the open internet.

I don't have a solid solution for this. So my question to you is,

How do you respect privacy while sharing content for search engines on a platform?

I've been researching internet privacy and fell down the rabbit hole of...well, internet privacy. I started with deleting Facebook/Instagram and switching to fire fox + plugins. I would like to make more improvements but I really have no idea how, it started with deleting socials and next thing you know I'm looking at LineageOS and de-googling.

If anyone has any suggestions on where to go next while staying realistic/not going crazy, i would love to hear them. I am not really sure where to set my expectations, basically I would like to have more control of my data. The other day Google photos gave me a memory recap which kind of creeped me out! I am suddenly not fond of whatever is going on under the surface of Google photos that's making collages and trying to sell my photo books. Also g-board giving me a pop up in the text prediction row asking me to rate the app??? Ew.

I am a fan of self hosting and run a small NAS (open media vault) but this too quickly turns into the privacy spiral and leaves me thinking I should throw my phone into a river and live in the forest. Would love to hear your thoughts/advice/opinions!