We did. #Linux #LibreOffice #Thunderbird #DuckDuckGo #Nextcloud #Signal #Mastodon

We should have stopped at MySpace.

Regular users were warned 10 years ago to drop all social media like Facebook but they have no incentive to do this. They are now using AI on top of that because they don't care about privacy anymore.

Governments were too lazy to change, but they had/have to do it now because of Trump (mostly) and maybe a bit because of the war in Ukraine, and Russia, China, and North Korea hacking everything. That's why they are now thinking of replacing Microsoft products like Office, creating European clouds, and relying more on European AI. But administrations are not known for being smart or fast in their decisions.

I would say the biggest unifying factor for all Lemmy users is the belief that big tech sucks for one reason or another. If you want someone to answer 'No' to this question then you need to ask it somewhere else.

Change is inevitable.

If you live in a capitalist society, everything will eventually become monetized.

Tech isn't the problem; monetization is.

Yes.

We should have done that yesterday.

But the next best time is now.

Yes, of course.

We SHOULD be passing laws that protect people's rights from corporations the same way we protect those rights from the government. We SHOULD be passing laws that enshrine the right to be forgotten, by forcing companies to either respond quickly to delete requests, or have massive penalties per day, paid to the person, not to the govt. We SHOULD be building public, free alternatives like a library in cyberspace that is for public good, not profit. We should stop forcing ID laws, and start forcing encryption. Think bigger than tech withdrawals, instead take the opinion that tech should serve everyone, not the rich and powerful. Hobbyists and open source built practically all of the internet, and only later did money and politics take over.

The internet used to be a quirky free library. They turned it into an aggressive rent seeking monster.

We should have enforced monopoly laws

The issue isn't creating the tools, but making them easy enough for mass adoption. Big tech got big, not because they had the best tools, but because they made sure that anyone could use them in a way a lot of open source tools aren't.

We should've slowed down tech earlier. It's gotten too rapid.

Depends on who you mean by we; if you mean literally everyone then yes absolutely, but I highly doubt we'd be that coordinated or monolithic. If you mean the people like us on the fediverse who are currently trying to do it then I think starting earlier would only make a mild to modest increase in our number.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time to plant a tree is now

Your digital footprint is an extension of yourself and how much effort you put into it is up to you. In the same way we encourage people to not eat junk food made by shitty companies, we encourage people to manage their digital presence and support non-shitty companies.

But its hard to eat healthy in the same way its hard to set up accounts and tech that you control, its a concious effort. Do not let perfection be the enemy of progress, anything done to improve your footprint is progress in not feeding digital dragons.

Yes

Most people, most of the time, do not care about anything that doesn't directly affect their daily life.

In order to accomplish most things, it requires going against basic human nature.

Yes. We already screwed it up when Internet Protocol took over and DNS was established. There were better methods. There are better methods.

That aside, we did have alternatives to big tech software for a long time:

• Linux
• Berkeley Software Distributions
• All GNU software
• LibreOffice, formerly OpenOffice
• Mozilla software, at least historically, and forks of it
• Etcetera

Yes, or start raising the potential problems much sooner.

To any anti AI millennials I try to point out that there’s a direct line from google search (which millennials were crazy about in the day) to AI.

100% yes. These fucks should be told to get back in their respective baskets for a whole multitude of reasons. Learning how to self host has become a hobby. A hobby which is becoming increasingly difficult to expand on due to insane costs caused by you guessed it, Big Tech

Most people literally pay big tech companies so that big tech companies solve technical problems for the user. There is literally not a single reason why an ordinary user should refuse this.

And responding to some comments, computers were originally damn expensive. The fact that for a short period of time computers' prices leveled out with consoles is not the norm, but a lucky coincidence. I think soon consoles will finally stop being PCs on an AMD chip with a custom OS... Again.

Something about the best time to plant a tree