from Hacker News

Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification and Throw It into Reverse

by NGRhodes on 9/28/24, 8:21 PM with 1 comments

• by johnklos on 9/28/24, 9:15 PM

  Educating regular people and getting them to care is really, really hard. I can't tell you how often I hear the silly trope, "I have nothing to hide, so who cares if company X tracks everything I do?" Until companies do something to tangibly - not just abstractly - hurt people, they really don't care at all if they're the frog in the pot of water over heat, even when you tell them they're the frog in the pot of water over heat and that things are just going to get worse.

  I agree that interoperability should be forced on everyone and that it shouldn't be criminal. The only reasonable way to get apathetic people off of Facebook, for instance, or at least less hooked on and less affected by Facebook, is to give them access to Facebook from elsewhere, via means that don't allow Facebook to track every action those users take.

  One good example I like to give people is search: Google used to be good, but nowadays they suck, plus even if you want to use them, every search gets tied to every page you visit, every thing you do that they can track. Setting up SearXNG lets people use Google for search, plus use other search engines, without Google getting to tie those searches to you, without Google manipulating what you see based on how they think they can extract money.

  We need more of that - much more of it - for Facebook, for Amazon, and so on.