Cut out Spotify for Navidrome

Cut out Netflix for Jellyfin

Keep it all secure and accessible with Wireguard

All of the above solutions are free.

Run all of the above in docker on any old laptop. An llm can provide instructions.

As someone who walks everywhere....I am not fit. So no flip side. It's uphill both ways

or, you know, you can have best of both worlds with open technologies. tech that you own and control.

My family and immediate friends are all on my Matrix server.

I have my own dedicated public server, so I can selfhost anything I want. And I do selfhost a lot.

You still work. You still buy. You still support the system.

Of course, because I'm no more 16 arguing that a revolution is the solution.

That’s exactly what is so nice about FOSS based systems. You can use technology but without the tech bros and the corporate enshittification.

Indeed, you are thoroughly pacified. Your objections and moral outage quelled and your sense of significance sustained by the illusion that simply buying from a different conglomerate will have any impact.

Any suggestion that your impotent protest is inadequate must surely come from a childish fool.

I selfhost since so long that some of my domains could vote, but I still need some "mainstream" channels to be reached by several people.

If we can argue that close friends will put extra effort to contact you on whatever you use, it's also true that your landlord, the plumber, the chick you picked up last night, won't give a shit and simply consider you a lunatic 99% of times if you tell them to use anything non-mainstream.

Ping me when you changed the world with whatever you are actually doing behind that keyboard

Masturbating, I'm masturbating. And so are you when you think that voting with your wallet does anything.

Lots of things have always had middlemen. Any sales representative you've ever encountered is a commission-driven middleman. Cars, insurance, housing, the guy at the phone store - they all exist solely to make money doing what a well made website is valuable of. If a company has a sales team, they ate unnecessary middlemen.

I agree the examples are all over the place.

I drive a pre-online car I can fix with the help of a friend, PC is Linux mint, laptop is Mac but highly restricted. My android device is silent, my iPhone is used for work only. My music is ripped and downloaded.

Masturbating, I’m masturbating.

Wow! Do it in public fully naked with the reasons of the protest tattooed on your body. You may hit the news and reach lots of people!

We (mostly my brother and I) convinced our octogenarian parents to switch the whole family group to Signal, many years ago. It works nicely. What saddens me though, is that Signal will never replace WA for most people, it's Just One More App for them.

help desk -> sysadmin -> CISO -> goat farmer

The comic is hyperbolic and not in a good way. "They wouldn't like it" - yeah, if millions of Americans did the same. And it isn't even necessary to go pre-digital or pre-internet to "cut out the middleman".

I agree with you on most, but this:

which includes driving a gas guzzler from the 70s, apparently?

is hyperbole on your part.

First of all, by-default internet connected cars haven't been a thing until relatively recently (10 years max I guess). And then, gas guzzling does not necessarily correlate with age. Cars consuming less than, say, 5l/100km have existed since at least the 80s (1st hand experience, and the car was already 20 years old at that point).

telemetry ... cell connection

When did this start to be a standard feature anyhow, and how does adoption track across brands & timeline?

Same here, mine is 2006 and already quite computerized for my taste.

But recently I did a trip in a 2020s car and it was ... disconcerting. First of all it was automatic which I'm not used to. Unable to get it in gear, the 9yo boy in the backseat said: look at the screen, it's telling you what to do!. He was right. Even so the car would not let me back into a patch of high grass, kept blocking the wheels. Jarringly.

In the EU, cars have to be equipped with automatic emergency call systems since 2018. So probably since then most brands will have had it, as they are required to have cell connection hardware anyway.