Why it’s time? It’s been time for 15+ years. You are the product. These companies are not your friends and aim to exploit you. Full stop.
Mf its been time to do that since 2013 for facebook and since musk bought twitter.
What happened in 2013?
Snowden leaks. But also the Cambridge analytica scandal should also have been a red flag for everyone
Cambridge Analytic was just a bit past when I got rid of it
One nice thing about being in Canada. Meta opted out of the news game and now we can say that any “news” shared on Meta is legit fake.
Me: So where did you see this “news” ?
Other Person: I don’t remember who sent it but it was in my Facebook feed.
M: You’re still in Canada, right?
O: Yes, so? What’s that got to do with anything?
M: So it’s fake.
O: How do you know? How do you know the other stuff isn’t fake and the only true news is on Facebook?
M: Because under C-18, big megacorps like Google and Meta would have to pay up for each piece of genuine news that they share. Google agreed and worked out a deal, but Meta said no way.
O: And…?
M: So that means anything you see in Facebook isn’t real news. Because Meta won’t pay for it, so they’d block it if it was real. Literally everything you see there is fake news.
O: No way that’s true.
M: Why don’t you ask Facebook? https://about.fb.com/news/2023/06/changes-to-news-availability-on-our-platforms-in-canada/
O: (long pause)
O: Dang.
Cambridge should’ve been when everyone was done and tossed them out. But people are too weak
Just use the Fediverse (Mastodon, Misskey, and/or Lemmy.) When potential hates peech is a concern, pick a good secure instance with preferred moderation style.
Next would also be to get off of Youtube. Use Peertube to host your videos. If you are operating an organization, might benefit the hardest when maintaining your own personal instance so your content can’t be removed.
I use to say to use Searx, but we need a newer, and better alternative that is somehow federated.
The best alternative I found is YaCy, which is a decentralised search engine. Unlike SearXNG, it does not rely on external search engines.
Unfortunately, perhaps due to the low number of users, its performance is bad.
YouTube is the last one I really struggle with. There really is no alternative that can match it currently and I’m not sure PeerTube will ever get there.
Streaming videos and creating engaging content is expensive and I don’t know that donations are really going to save us.
I do highly recommend Nebula though. There is at least good content there without it being Google.
?
SearXNG seems fine, it’s open source under the AGPL-3.0 license.
I do like SearXng. My issue with it is that it’s just using the search engines that are currently dominating for the search engine market.
I want something that is like Lemmy, where you can have all kinds of websites including websites from the traditional web we know today. But each instance would have it’s own search engine crawler. Possibly with various interface support. Something that does not relieve on Google at all for search results. Something new, federated and innovative.
I’d imagine SearXNG would still work for your usecase as it’s a search aggregator.
What it would currently need to fulfill your want is to hook it’s search function/system with each instances’ APIs
Edit:
I’m saying the above in a general sense as I haven’t actually looked at their source code.I’m wanting something where, people can put their sites on there, similarly to how people put their communities on lemmy, and then they the search engines can federate and you can browse the web based off of each individual instance’s indexed websites.
Would be interesting if SearxXg can do that. Or patch it in.
So Something where sites can be indexed from the traditional web but also from within the specific instances themselves, submitted by users.