De-Googleify Internet

Fb hasn't a reciprocal relationship with the web in the sense that it takes content from the web but doesn't give back. Best thing about Fb is that it's a good filter for people I choose not to care about, was what I was thinking. But now I believe the kind of communication going on in Fb is extremely detrimental, dangerous even, to an open society/democracy, because people with opposing views don't talk to each other but rather prefer to talk themselves into rage with like-minded people, and get fueled with fake news.

Needless to say, worse things happen in autocratic states.

It's only in Google's best interest the web doesn't become a scripted ghost town anymore than it already is. Therefore I don't understand what they want to accomplish with AMP.

I used to think that p2p is the future of the web, but eg. zeronet/ipfs don't help one bit with the above problems. Also, I don't want to cede the web; it was created by a whole generation of liberal-minded people.

Google should leverage their power for something big to counter web balkanization and echo chambers.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-quora-login-...

a goal is not a strategy, and as other posters have pointed out, these offerings are Not Very Good. Nor has Frama invested much in making them accessible. For example, I am a big consumer of news, so I clicked on FramaNews...only to be taken to a page entirely in French.

Now I happen to know french, and like it, but most people....don't. And there wasn't much on the page anyway other than an exhortation to use RSS. If you can't be bothered to localize in even a few major languages, how am I supposed to be confident about the development of quality services? I agree wholeheartedly with the principle, but restricting myself to only using Free Software means I'm going to incur a major hit to my productivity, which is strategically stupid. I would be better off leveraging the capitalist establishment's tools against them to provoke change than sitting around waiting for for free software tools to catch up.

It depresses me that a lot of free software advocates don't seem to get or care how shitty their products are. I know, if you've spent ages working for nothing on a very complex software product it's infuriating to have some jackass like me come along and sneer at it. But a lot of Free software products are, well, broken. I use LibreOffice but I hate it, because of things like selecting a single paragraph for a formatting change only to have the paragraph before or after included in the format change as well. I get that making a WYSIWYG word processor is a truly massive software development undertaking, but what's the point if it doesn't work properly for even the most basic tasks? It's like a bicycle with the world's most incredible carbon-fiber frame where one of the wheels consistently falls off. I don't care how brilliantly engineered the thing is or how much work went into it or how great the sacrifices of the designers were; if the wheels fall off it's a shitty bicycle.

I am left-wing. I'm very much in favor of cooperative ventures, Free culture, mutuality, privacy, and all the other things the Frama people care about. I want to live in essentially the same kind of world they want to live in. I want to support this project....but I'm not going to, because my resources are too limited and using (most of) the tools they recommend might make my life better in theory but is definitely going to make it worse in practice.

tl;dr ain't nobody got time for that shit if it don't work right.

After all, you could be completely free from Google and every other technological capitalist firm right now by throwing away your computer, phone and so on, and returning to ink and paper for your communication requirements. But of course you don't want to do that because it would entail a terrible loss of convenience, and every time you needed some information you would be forced to make a trip to the library or bookstore, or ask someone else to find the information for you etc. etc.. There is nothing ethically or psychologically bad about such a life - many of us are old enough to remember growing up that way - but it will put you at a severe economic and social disadvantage compared to virtually all of your peers.

In theory, I agree with you (and I mean that on many levels; I'm a devoted fan of Michel Foucault, for example). But I cannot eat theory, even if you consider it to be delicious cake.

No they won't. Otherwise dictatorships wouldn't survive for very long. Most people do whatever they're told by whoever has power and think as little as possible.