Asklemmy

You seem to be taking about something other than enshittification, which has a specific meaning and isn't just places not respecting privacy or whatever. Per Cory Doctorow (who invented the term) via Wikipedia:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

If enshittification is what you're assist interested in reducing, check out Cory's book, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

Start getting into self hosting, you dont need all that expensive hardware. An old laptop can get you started.

Heres some stuff you can do.

Fix youtube:

A script (with yt-dl) on a schedule checks a list of channels to download x amount latests videos from their channel.

Fix Television Streaming:

Jellyfin allows you to stream your own content regardless where you sourced it. I output the youtube videos from above in it

Fix Music Stream

Ive setup Navidrone to stream my music library. Previously i only ever played locally stored music but storage space limits forced me to look beyond and its been working well

Fix Cloud computing

Get full control and ownership of your data so it cant be exploited behind your back. Nextcloud is well documented on how to setup your own cloud system including office apps, calendars.

Fix personal online communication.

Signal appears to be one of the only ones competent to so it right.

In general on the web:

• Always ublock origin, I've yet to see a better one and i flat-out wont use the desktop web without.

• Use bookmarks for sites you visit regularly rather then giving search engine the extra traffic every time. This sounds super mild but its actually a focus lifehack. You dont need 90% of the shit your being distracted with.

Most people only need a handful of urls for a few functions. For me half of those are selfhosted and those that arent are in someway selected and configured for personal least hassle least shit experience. Ever since I bookmarked Wikipedia and wolfram i’ve used them more to get answers than conventional search engines.

I go outside and roll around in the grass with my dogs. There's no enshittification outside.

I'd start with ublock origin for browser extensions, and then add more things based on what you're looking to do :)

You've already mentioned a few, but another might be to explore alternatives to the bad services and start a process to migrate over. That can look like anything from reducing your dependence on a service to moving over entirely.

ex. unfollow people and things you don't care about

Support indie bussiness, especially local business.

1. uBlock Origin
2. Use LibRedirect for privacy respecting front ends. These eliminate ads, pop ups, cookie banners, etc. on the respective services.
3. Get a DNS sinkhole like PiHole or NextDNS to remove ads from apps.
4. Get a Media Server like Jellyfin or Plex to make your movie, tv and music experience better. Apps like symfonium and Infuse make things even better

• Firefox
• uBlock
• Reader mode on any sites that have excessive ads (recipes, articles)
• PaywallHub to get around paywalls
• Disable JS
• Facebook Container if you need to use FB
• Host your own services like email and drive, or use services that the privacy community likes

This should be enough to avoid 99% of annoyances.

disable JavaScript and images in your browser

stick to "publisher" sites rather than "platform" sites / Web 2.0 / social media

The best tip I can give you, one that actually has an impact is, if a system sucks, don't be afraid to set up your own system.

I used to put all photos I wanted to share on DeviantArt, but that site has just got slower and overall worse the last decade.

Back in the spring of 2023 I had just got a new camera was getting more and more annoyed at dA for how slow it was.

So I decided to do it myself, I use digiKam as a photo organizer, it can create decent HTML galleries, so I use those and just built a nice HTML/CSS index page, and pop it all on a private webhost.

It is blazingly fast, I can use arrow key navigation in the galleries and it is just a fantastic experience.

And since I only really wanted a place to share my photos with friends and family it is enough for me.

I won't link it here as it contains my name.

Go to spacex. Steal a rocket. Live on the moon.

Self host as much as you can. Use smaller services when you can’t. And pay for things you don’t host yourself. If it’s free to you, it’s because you’re the product.

On Android, using an app like DuckDuckGo or TrackerControl is huge for protecting your data in other apps

reduce the enshittification

Whatever you want to buy out there, do a proper research on it.

Most definitely , there will be a review of it, be it from YouTube, blogs; there should be someone talking about it (perks of the internet)

If not, you better run.

Being an early adoptor is a recipe for disappointments.

Be veeeeeery wary of browser addons. They gain access to the data of every web page. Can monitor keystrokes, etc. so… usernames, passwords, bank accounts. How hard would it be for a developer to maliciously add code that is distributed to thousands of devices?

Pretty easy if you ask XZ

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor