(2023-07-03) When will you learn to... learn?
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Case one. A retro game streamer complains about YouTube introducing mandatory
user handles "with those stupid @-signs" and Twitch tightening the
censorship policies around the content and restreaming rights. When I
mentioned some perfectly viable alternatives (like PeerTube, Odysee or even
to set up an Owncast server — a turnkey solution to make "your own personal
Twitch") and that more streams on alternative platforms mean more motivation
for their authors to improve them and less motivation for the monopolists to
play gods, he told me he won't bother even thinking of doing it until the
majority does and until the audience moves to them. Not a single thought of
how the audience moves to them if no streamer does. But yet again, he keeps
complaining about increasing limitations of Twitch and YouTube Live, while I
already have set up my Owncast server within 10 minutes on this very VPS.
Case two. Twitter is broken once again, this time beyond repair: no tweets
can be viewed without having an account (effectively rendering my and other
Nitter instances totally useless), and even if you do have an account, there
is a... daily view limit. Doesn't matter how many tweets you can view: the
mere fact of having such a limit in 2023 is a sign of total FUBAR. I don't
have a Twitter account since long ago, but I used to read some critical
information via my Nitter instance. Well, no more. Conscious people moved to
Mastodon and other ActivityPub-based services immediately, less sane people
remembered they had a Juick account, but some "activists" started actively
PR-ing some no less totally proprietary bullshit like Post or Bluesky.
I understand one thing. In both cases, these people didn't learn to learn.
And it is their unwillingness to learn, their lame ignorance and passivity
that leads to global dystopian disasters. They like when others think for
them. They like to be controlled and spied on. They gladly trade their
security for convenience, without a second thought about consequences for
themselves and people surrounding them. At most, they want "trendsetters" to
make the switch, not understanding those guys are paid to NOT do so or to
give the plebs an illusion of choice. The latter happens much more often
than we are used to think. For example, I don't understand why the "Linus
Tech Tips" YT channel hasn't changed its name to "Billy Tech Tips". Because
that guy doesn't deserve to be called Linus. Dirty Billy is his modus
vivendi for sure.
When it comes to the choice of online services and/or software, I have a
single rule of thumb: "those who choose bread over freedom, eventually lose
both". In other words, look which services mostly try to take the control
away from you, and avoid them no matter what. It's not a big deal if the
free/distributed/federated alternatives aren't as convenient out of the box,
it's just a matter of time for them to improve while also giving you an
opportunity to grow your own bread. But in this case you know that you own
your data, your computing resources and your online identity. In any other
case, you're contributing to online slavery, global botnets and total
surveillance. And you are personally responsible for all this tightening the
knots around the Internet freedom's neck.
By the way, that retro streamer also laughs at me for preferring Matrix over
Discord. We'll see who has the last laugh.
