This year we made good progress. You know, Linux gaming becoming better, Reddit fucking up, Metaverse failing etc. But on the other hand Big Tech has or are planning to make some moves. Such as, Google’s Web Enviroment Integrity API (EDIT: they backed off), UK’s encryption bill, etc.

So what do you think of the future? I’m currently optimistic. I think the best recent event was Reddit fucking up. Obviously one of the biggest information sources going down that path isn’t something to celebrate. But it was bound to happen. I believe decentralized social networks becoming more popular is what Aaron Swartz would have wanted if he saw how Reddit was being managed.

  • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    The core is the surveillance advertising, to create incommings with profiling and tracking user data, practiced by practically all large US companies. This is the underlying evil that must be eradicated, not only by putting the user’s privacy in question, degrading him to simple raw material and merchandise, but also security by filtering sensitive data, such as medical and banking. This requires a deep review to eliminate it as a means of income for companies. With this, an important step towards a free internet is already achieved.

    It is essential to educate users to ALWAYS read the TOS and PP of a software or service before using it, avoiding those who obviously share user data with third parties and looking for alternative products, which there surely are. It is the company’s ethics regarding the user that is most important today. If there are more and more users who set these criteria, these companies will have to change or they will run out of users.

    eg Google has excellent products that, from a technical aspect, are impeccable and many of them without a real alternative, it is their ethics regarding the user, which makes them unacceptable, this is the point and trying to tell people that, yes, the product is Good, but the price is your sovereignty, look for another one, perhaps not as complete, but it serves you the same and does not turn you into a simple product.

    It is the user who determines the market, but only if they learn not to fall into the trap of big companies with products that shine so beautifully. It is the user who must determine what he needs, not the company.

  • SmokeyDope@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    No way to predict the future but I have some hopes that people will be pushed to find decentralized open alternatives as companies squeeze harder and harder. It ultimately comes down to just how much the average person is willing to take.

    Some people have philosophies and limits to just how how much they take from corporate overlords treating them as cattle, some just want their convinent entertainment/escapism and will tolerate just about anything. We will see just how many people still have standards and how many will continue to suck corporate cock for sweet sweet convinence until the end of time. It’s also time for the tech nerds to scream to the heavens. A big issue with decentralized social services is that nobody knows about them. Those of us in the know need to do our part to shill and shill and shill. Everyone needs to know about searxng, peertube, Lemmy, the fediverse, public Access Unix servers, the Gemini protocol, the lot. The average person NEEDS to know that there are community run free services that they can turn to in the face of corpos squeezing harder and harder to take your money and reduce your rights.

    In the worst case scenario and google fucks the whole internet, we can start again.

    Huge advances in radio communication technology and cryptographic blockchains allow the ideas of a mesh based decentralized internet to be really possible.

    Imagine a world where everyone has their own slice of the internet in the form of a mesh router that also host their personal homepage, and everyone has a continually updated copy of the whole internet locally. All built on open technology and protocols. The ISPs cut out. Once and done payment for the router box. A truly free internet unshackled from companies.

  • TheDarkKnight@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Currently it certainly feels like OS is kicking the crap out of big tech in the AI space. Tech might have the money, but they don’t have enough brains to win the intelligence battle against the collective weight of nerds worldwide lol.

      • TheDarkKnight@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        TBH your best bet to check out what is trending on Github everyday for a little bit, it’s roughly 90% OS AI projects of varying states of maturity. One of the more refined ones is taking the form in phind.com, which is a pretty great programming site, supposedly beating GPT-4’s capabilities!

        • ganymede@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Thanks, do you know if/where we can download the full phind source including the full models, training data etc? To run 100% offline?

          edit: for anyone reading this thread, YOU CAN’T. it’s not currently opensource. and afaik there is no concrete timeline for it to be opened, other than sometime “down the road”.

          to be clear, i definitely agree we have the creative nerd factor the corporations lack, but unfortunately there’s been a bit of trading on ‘open’ while still being very closed in the “AI” world, really hope this doesn’t turn out to be another example of that.

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Privacy is unironcally getting better, it’s only bad because of the vulnerability in our current web design we’re hardening against. Https and hello encrypt go a long way to hide our traffic, definitely not anonymous though. E2ee has never been as prevalent as it is now.

    Corporations spying are obviously bad, but if it’s possible, then it’s inevitable that it was going to happen regardless and it’s a good thing we’re hardening our protocols against what was fundamentally a design flaw that would inevitably be exploited eventually.

    Decentralization has never been nearly as popular or robust as it is now. I spend 90% of my social media on decentralized apps, which I could never say that before. My phone is as private as it has ever been with GrapheneOS.

    Laws are getting more robust for privacy, some of the time anyways. Fascist laws in the name of “think of the children!” are trying to break encryption and privacy and are constantly a battlefield we need to be extremely vigilant over.