Comment by kelnos
20 days ago
Yep. I feel powerless, and I don't know what to do. I don't think there is anything I can do, except for watch all of technology get locked down to the point that you need a monopolist's or a government's permission before you do anything with it.
It's so fundamentally depressing, and completely at odds with how I grew up viewing tech.
There are tons of things you can do, from spreading the word, organize politically or work on building an alternative ecosystem. Also donate to organizations like EFF.
We're being pushed a message that we're all impotent but the reality is that collectively we can change things, and apathy is exactly what these people try to push onto us.
Things get worse but there are also good laws being pushed: see for example digital markets act and GDPR. 2008 when I started using Linux, gaming on Linux was horrible. Now it's day and night, and linux, while still small, is more popular and usable than ever. Recently alternative social medias like Bluesky, and Mastodon enable more open ecosystems and they've gained a lot of traction.
Android has alternative ecosystems like F-Droid and GrapheneOS that can be built upon and hopefully we can get it to a point where we can ditch Google. We need to keep up the fight.
Donate is the key term here. If you want there to be alternatives to everything that's getting worse, you need to make those alternatives sustainable - even if they're not there yet. You can donate to alternative Android ROMs, efforts to make Linux on mobile usable, and support companies that actually care about users like Fairphone. They all need money to live.
Sweet talk and online activism is great, but the TLDR is always open-source developers need money to work.