This is just a vent. Disregard if not interested.
Since I started my DeGoogle journey, I

• switched to a more trustworthy VPN that I use more stringently than before;
• deconvoluted personal and work accounts;
• deleted third-party Google logins and set up email / PW logins instead for corporate sites that I do use; I also started using
• NextTube;
• Lemmy;
• Matrix;
• DuckDuckGo, Qwant;
• LibreWolf, IronFox, Mullvad Browser;
• more open source productivity programs, where work admins permit;
• avoid AI use or use locally-hosted or responsibly managed AI where it actually gives me a productivity benefit.

The more I DeGoogle, the more the wonderful rainbow land that should be the internet just starts to feel like a deep dark forest where everything is purposefully designed to exploit the user or wall them off. It's tiring. User name checks out, I guess. Thanks for listening to my rant, please go on with your -hopefully- wonderful days now.

Yep, I know what you mean. Take it as a good reason to spend more time reading physical books, playing with your dog, making art, going outside and talking to humans, etc. That's arguably the real payoff of becoming aware of all this shit.

True that. Even though that is also made more difficult by that same social environment often being fully googled and thus always busy with some slop.

Yes, I was just talking to my kids about this. I sometimes think the web is just so bad now, I'm not sure i want to spend any significant time on it.

That was, of course the goal when I started degoogling 7 or 8 years ago, but I didn't think I would be as disgusted as I am.

Internets origins lie in the Semi-Automated Ground Environment & the Phoenix Program. It was rolled out to CIA-approved universities & invite-only sites for journalists. It will still be part of a bright future. Technology looks sinister when it is held in its most developed forms by the worst people imaginable. They're already scared of what they started.

How old are you? The older web was a crap-shoot, and every little action could nickel-and-dime you if you let it, to the point that Google at-first felt like a breath of fresh-air, and before that Yahoo, Compuserve, AOL and more were often treated as freemium refuges from the possibility of stumbling-upon something truly scammy. Long-distance calls and SMS cost money, beyond the regular phone-bill.

If anything, I regularly delve into shadier, or at least less familiar, corners of the internet today than I ever did before the advertisers blacklisted anything fun, and the porn-adverts I ignore instead are downright respectful compared to the pop-up ads that were already everywhere back in the day.

... but yes, it seems every Tom, Dick and Jane with a blog has a side-hustle now, often selling the service of ordering via scary foriegn websites so you can recieve the same products drop-shipped from China as any retailer, only with a slightly-smaller markup. At least you usually have to visit their blogs to find that out, rather than them knocking on your door or cold-calling to sell you the latest and greatest from Amway.

Spoiler (I apologize for what I said when I was 11)

old enough to bang your mum, hahaha

No, seriously. I think many would agree that the internet user experience peaked some time after Google entered the scene (*yes, officer, right down this sub*) but before YouTube left every serious competitor behind. There was a lot of "small web" content with no clear commercial intent (not blasting you with two affiliate links and one video ad per paragraph). Many of the big platforms were controlled by the techies who set them up and not yet by the venture capital who would eventually buy them out. Yet, venture capital already kept these firms afloat, so a lot of genuinely good services were genuinely free for the user and not paywalled or privacy-paywalled (*just give us your email address and IP, bro, trust us bro, just one more captcha, bro, maybe one more 2FA using your phone number, bro, really, we might even let you visit our site then*). Of course, someone had to pay up eventually: Enshittification ensued.

A second aspect: For the past decade at least, democratic-presenting governments have used all our web data fed into clandestine technology to win elections, either to stay in power or get into power and pull up the ladder behind them. I guess it's like that old saying: A small time criminal robs a bank, a big time criminal owns a bank. Sure, we had all sorts of amateur criminals on the web in the predotcom and dotcom era and that might've cooled down a bit since. But now all the big players are adversarial, instead.

Edit: Typo in spoiler tag

I mean, if you're that-into 78-year-olds, good luck with her ... but yes, I was around and active on the internet back then too.

I wasn't speaking of the experiences of others. I have fonder memories of Compuserve, early Metasearch.com, askjeeves and even Yahoo or AoL, than google. Gmail's "free" 15gb is what suckered me. Somewhere in the middle of it all Microsoft "partnered" with Bigfix and other scammers(which degraded first the scammers, as they no longer had to pretend or retain even a hint of some of the genuine products they had bought-out), and then Google "bought"(became) Doubleclick ... and you already knew all that and the rest.

"Download more RAM" was real 😅

That's a completely fair opinion, even though I would argue that Google pagerank is a genuinely revolutionary piece of code that has, taken on its own, made the internet a better place.

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I have not. To be perfectly honest, I don't really understand how that would even work. Can you elaborate? At home, I run a local model with a Kobold CCP backbone to localhost. The physical network is a private Wifi, though the computer is running VPN and I haven't given much thought about what that means for the AI via localhost. At work, I can thankfully use a responsibly managed AI (company servers, very strong and externally audited data privacy standard with zero on-server data retention) for coding.