this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. And it's a death knell of the internet as we know it. It won't be today or tomorrow, but slowly, over the next few years, expect surface level internet services to be extremely user unfriendly. I expect normies to just accept their fate and pay access fees to literally every website and service they use, while more tech savvy or explorative people might find their way to federated spaces or Usenet, etc.
Then don't let Chrome be a super majority of users.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
Exactly this is the problem, when I talk non-geek (including my wife) about privacy they answer "what the hell have you to hide !" ... It's so difficult to convince people :'(
But they do care about their money. Explain it in ways that will resonate with them.
Without ad blocking, they'll encounter "scam ads" that take over the browser and demand calling "support" that collects their credit card info and costs them hundreds of dollars in fraudulent charges. At the very least, it's a pain in the ass they have deal with by calling their credit card provider to cancel the charges.
Security extensions from antivirus/antimalware applications won't work and subject them to even more of the above.
Malicious "attestation" services can falsely verify unscrupulous websites as legitimate.
If you have a better plan, let me know.
Otherwise you can roll over and let the internet die and ill do what i can.
Allrighty mr. Dramagoodie. You go fight the good fight, or whatever your psykosis is called. Firefox is life, but normies be normies. You make zero impact.
Firefox literally used to be a significant browser before Chrome showed up. Users have to download Chrome. It's not like it default. It's just a matter of changing habits. They swapped from Firefox to Chrome they can back. They'll do it for thr same reason so many people left IE for Firefox: it sucked.
When ads get overbearing and scammy, your favorite neighbor IT guy will install Firefox for them or something and tell them to use it. A child or grandchild will do the same. So it has always been. That's how adblock even became so big. People didn't use it before.
Ads are so bad now, I actually went out of my way to install Firefox on my phone. My less technical relatives just refuse to use anything but apps.
I think some people must be young and have not witnessed the late 90s, early 00s, before Firefox.
You had way more new users whose only notion of the internet was the blue e icon. Macs were less popular and of course there were no smartphones.
Microsoft pulled all the bullshit. "Extending" the standards so standards compliant browsers would not work, serving broken pages on non IE browsers and convincing an enormous amount of moron webmasters to tell you to go "upgrade" to IE while your browser could perfectly render their site.
Yet Firefox did break that stranglehold.
But you need to connect with people. Don't try to do it via relatively abstract concepts such as privacy or freedom. Tell them that they won't be able to block any ads in a year or so if they keep using Chrome. That they won't be able to download whatever they want.. etc etc.
The internet was better before the normies joined. "I don't see the problem, Chrome is fine, I don't care if it spies" is a very common thing I hear.
The silver lining here might also be that the internet that we knew and loved 25 years ago might actually reappear. The 'other' stuff would just become background noise to the ones 'in the know'.
Lol wouldn't that be epic. IRC becoming a big thing again because discord, whatsapp, and all thr other business social media go to shit.
I'm ready.
I can't get into discord. As an old EFnet user, it's just clunky to me? I'm not sure, but it's not sticking for me
I was a regular Teamspeak user and Discord is just more friendly than TS imo
I sometimes wonder if this would be best outcome. Rather than spending so much effort trying to fight for the internet at large, those of us “in the know” just take our balls and go play in our own corner.
The fediverse might be a test of this it continues to survive but never turns mainstream.
There is an author - Tad Williams, who wrote the "Otherland" series. One of the chapters has the some of the main ensemble going to "treehouse" - aka what happened in this universe when the nerds, geeks and techno wizards took their ball and went home. The series as a whole is interesting if you like sci-fi. That chapter however seems more and more on the nose the older I get.