We are starting to see for quite some time big tech trying to get the internet under their control. We have seen half of the internet starting to block proxies. Tor is not usable in the normal internet anymore. More and more services require a government issued id for their account.

And now Google went ahead and did the final blow by announcing WEI. If that gets integrated on all popular sites, there will be no more open web. We try to fight back as much as we can, but the bitter truth is most people are already ‘good little pets’ of these giants.

Most of the people, are not just okay, but want these big brothers to handle everything for them. They want to get their finances, entertainment, social medias, government services all done for them by these giants without them even knowing. They are ready to live as big brother says. Half of them already don’t have individual opinions.

Although the fight still continues, It’s time to think about plan B. What if most of internet is blocked for us privacy conscious people? We need alternatives. It’s time to build an ecosystem that we people can use without the help of popular services. There are already a lot of softwares, but we need to fill the gaps fast. We need an open hardware, accessible and a fully open software stack including everyday apps for most of our needs and entertainments. On PC it’s almost there. Mobile terribly lacks in the lowest levels, but have some apps that can help.

PC

For PC, we can still install linux on most devices, so linux. For browsing, we can use firefox or any forks of that. Proton and skiff are good alternatives for basic email, storage etc. For social media we have federated systems like lemmy, services like odysee, mewe etc. Share services that you think should be in this list

Mobile

For mobile, we miss variety in hardware section. One option might be pinephone or other linux phones. Other option might ironically be Pixel. For OS, we can use graph eneOS, cal yx OS, linux based OS etc. But setting it up is currently very hard. For browsing, firefox for android is good (I use it) which also has extensions support. Above mentioned services like proton, skiff, lemmy, odysee, mewe etc. has android apps. For IM we have briar, Session, simpleX etc. Share services that you think should be in this list

Help me document a full recommended ecosystem. Maybe we can have a recommended guide. Maybe there are better options. Discuss.

  • @MigratingtoLemmy
    11•10 months ago

    People using Windows and MacOS, and to some extent even Ubuntu, are using cancer. I will not speak for them.

    Now, there are some things that can be done in the current situation, and a few suggestions for possibilities in the future. However, I will refrain from commenting about events which rely heavily on probability.

    1. As long as the relevant APIs are open to developers, “proxies” will be created, and people can enjoy relative privacy.
    2. Once these APIs are no longer available, it is only a matter of time before Web crawling these sites for content will no longer be possible.
    3. When that happens, we have to attempt to fall back towards the basis of our technologies: networking and systems (specifically, virtualisation). Technically speaking, in the worst case, you could run a VNC stream from a virtualised browser to your main computer to be able to engage with sites which utilise DRM. Run a VPN alongside said browser and companies like Google will have a fairly difficult time in tracking you (if you maintain relative privacy hygiene and understand contextual tracking by the bigger companies - using distinct, virtualised browsers should help).

    I do not know much about SOCKS5 to be able to comment on how useful that would be (I don’t even use proxies because I’m never sure if they are as useful as VPNs for privacy).

    Cheers