Trying to answer the question "What kind of digital life I'd want from here onwards?" surely is going to be an interesting exercise, giving the current poor state of all things online. Yes, #Enshittification, I'm looking at you!
I've spent the last few days playing catch-up and one thing for sure is that, so far, I know the online places I wouldn't want to return back to.
From there onwards, I guess it's time to explore and figure out what's next!
Mastodon is 100% the early days of social media all over. Some of you will already be familiar with this story.
My weather station (a very nice Netatmo that has served very well) crapped out after nearly 10 years of excellent service. I asked for recommendations here for a new station that would play nicely with #HomeAssistant, and hopefully, also HomeKit. I received *many* recommendations, with Ecowitt (and the brands it manufactures for) taking the lead.
A connection on here offered me their *unopened* Ecowitt weather station for a very generous price. It arrived yesterday, and I set it up, and it's already doing a great job. Works offline, talks to Home Assistant without any problems. I just need to do a couple of bits of configuration jiggery-pokery and it will pass data to HomeKit.
This is very much how things were when I first joined Twitter in 2007. In spite of attempts at #enshittification of everything, the #fediverse is putting up a good fight.
May your day online be as satisfying as mine was yesterday.
Cool, iOS doesn't have an "update all apps" anymore?
Man this OS is a fucking dumpster fire.
I wish #lemmy and the like took off.
It's a bad feeling to have abandoned #reddit because of their #enshittification only to keep getting pointed back there because people still use it and push useful information there.
Sad panda.
When someone argues for privacy and and an end to #enshittification, and they allegedly are against the #TurdReich ethnonaZionalist christofascist take over of our democracy, BUT they mainly publish or primarily keep their presence online at #DTBO owned by VC crypto techbros, such as #bluesky #substack #linkedin #reddit etc I immediately discount them as serious source or valid purveyor of factual observation of reality.
"Your driving privacy expires with your current car’s lifespan"
"Your car simply watches and decides whether you’re fit to drive"
Using technology to save lives is one thing, but this data will be in the hands of bad people.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/federal-surveillance-tech-becomes-mandatory-161321992.html
#driving #cars #AI #surveillance #surveillancetech #biometrics #infrared
#privacy #surveillancecapitalism #bigbrother #enshittification
Someone needs to call out these media outlets because the very act of opening their websites is equivalent to throwing your device to the vultures.
Reuters needs to be taught a lesson on website optimization.
#bloat #web #news #socialmedia #surveillance #privacy #enshittification
Wrote a little blog post about Windows and Linux, just surface thoughts because it's still morning.
https://dutchbarracuda.tumblr.com/post/811051136038682624/escaped-enshittification
‘Shockingly bad’: Nissan Leaf drivers voice anger over app shutdown | Electric, hybrid and low-emission cars | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/14/nissan-leaf-app-shutdown-nissanconnect-ev-app
Grammarly removes AI Expert Review feature mimicking writers after backlash
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/13/grammarly-removes-ai-expert-review-feature-mimicking-writers-after-backlash
A few days ago, I tested the Expert Review gadget by Grammarly. I asked it to generate a review of Expert Review and give impressions of Grammarly in the style of @BinChicken. It paused for a moment as though in thought, and then returned: "Get in the bin!"
Grammarly has been making software for around 15 years, primarily tools for spell-checking and grammar-checking. Grammarly used to have a pretty good reputation. Like so many other Tech companies lately, Grammarly has jumped on the bandwagon of stuffing AI into everything. The AI bubble is bursting because nobody is happy to discover they're on the receiving-end of Enshittification.
Expert Review works by stealing the life's work of experts (living and dead), using it to train a chat-bot, making marketing claims that the chat-bot is "Intelligent", and then selling the output to unwitting customers.
The experts saw this as a scientifically fraudulent misrepresentation of their academic work, a rip-off, and morally repugnant. Moreover, it's dishonest to customers because what the chat-bot produces is not a quote of what those experts said. It's made-up text, cobbled-together in the style of the experts, which is presented in a way that customers may be led to believe is an actual quote from the experts. This fiction (to put it politely) has no place in science, research, or education.
#Grammarly #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #ExpertReview #Enshittification #AIBubble
If SSD prices ever return to normalcy (ha), I think grabbing a new SSD for my 360 is in order. Everything continues to enshittify, and at this rate I'm just going to become a hermit, playing my offline consoles till the end of my days.
Amazon is changing their Prime ad-free subscription to $5/month "Prime Extra Cool with a Side of Fries" so I just told them to F off and canceled that.
There is no such #Enshittification of #Meta products. 🤪
I had missed this video by #LouisRossman on #enshittification and his #ConsumerRightsWiki. Well worth a watch, also for the nice PSA by the Norwegian government that's included in the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii-D9LaitUw&t=589
He's not on the #Fediverse, is he? 🤔
Enshittification is ruining everything online
Is this the first time a major service has removed end-to-end encryption instead of adding it? Why Instagram?
#instagram #socialmedia #privacy #infosec #technology #enshittification
MIF - My Ideal Forum. Part 2.
I connected with Arthur (@radarsu), a dev building a data-sovereignty protocol without blockchains. We moved from Discord to Matrix and had a great talk.
His vision: a "Personal CMS" – desktop app with email client, storage for notes/passwords/photos, and a publishing platform to cross-post to socials. All decentralized: your data stays with you, you grant permissions per app, no more cookie pop-ups, no lock-in. User verification via 3D face hash (like realeyes.ai) – anonymous but bot-proof.
Meanwhile, my tiny team shaped our MIF first steps: spin up different forum sites, sync them via DB converters, fill with useful content from parsers (ethically). Maximum "collective farm" decentralization for starters. Later – selective sync so each node stores only what its users want. Need experts for the final DB schema.
Day well spent. 🛠️
Full text of the article - https://write.as/tfe43wde4kf8l.md
#DataSovereignty #DecentralizedWeb #OpenProtocol #Enshittification #web3
Widzi pan, panie Altman...
Gdybyście ChataGPT utrzymali jako open source a OpenAI byłaby naprawdę otwarta, to pan może nie byłby aż tak bogaty, ale wielu chętnie dołączałoby do rozwoju, jak i wspierało.
A tak to pleciesz pan bzdurę za bzdurą, wiedząc że czas OpenAI jest policzony i że albo etat w Microslopie albo Google, ewentualnie emerytura i zabawa w inwestowanie w startupy.
Nie jest mi pana szkoda.
https://spidersweb.pl/2026/03/sam-altman-ai-licznik-prad-woda.html
When buying WordPerfect in 1987 for my desktop PC whose only link to the surrounding world was a 2400 bps modem and a copper telephone wire, I don't remember having any feeling that the Wordperfect Corporation wanted to spy on me, sell my personal information, enshittify the software and fund global fascism.
Maybe there is a market for similar products today as well.
Cory Doctorow @pluralistic es una de las voces que marca el camino en la conquista de un futuro digital justo. Y es divertido :). No te lo pierdas.
Presenta #Enshittification traducido con ❤️ por @Capitan_Swing
📍 Llibreria Finestres
📅 20 de marzo · 19.00 h
The #enshittification of gaming.
When companies want to make money, not games.
Either #MicroSlop is running out of money (which is unlikely) or they are not making enough money and are deluding themselves thinking that the #enshittification of free copilot services for students will result in millions of students running to them with money in their mouth. From my point of view this can be instead a great boost for academic institution to start running locally on-prem LLM chatbots in a sovereign environment. Only time will tell.
YouTube expands unskippable 30-second ads to TVs after $40 billion revenue year
https://www.techspot.com/news/111655-youtube-expands-unskippable-30-second-ads-tvs-after.html
Wow, "open to brand messages" that's why I'm running #firefox, they sure got me figured out!
