I am a phone scroller and social media reader and a YouTube watcher. My phone and by extension my Google account are my mobile office. I regret having to buy an Apple Mac Mini but I am not giving up Logic as my DAW. I got away from overpriced Samsung devices a few years ago and have a fairly bloat-free Motorola. Now I want to dump the Google ecosystem. I intend to download all of my pics and files from Drive and the Google cloud. I am not so tech savvy that I can install APKs or switch to Linux, and I’d like to watch video streamers that aren’t saturated in developer links (seriously, why do y’all do this?..just put one simple link to “Developer Info” or something and put all the other links there). I want to use and enjoy the net like any idiot would but without being The Product. I am Lemmy over Reddit (though you both ban me from subs with equal ferver); MeWe over Facebook (though MeWe is moving towards an unprivate model now); Mastodon over Xittstain. I have a ProtonMail account, but mainly for registrations…I have had a Gmail account since Earthlink took a nosedive.
What/who else is out there for me to frequent and replace all the corporatist models?in the past I tried Minds (all Nazis all the time!) and Ello (socmed for creative types, yet still looks like a shitty 1970’s mimeographed zine). I also spent a couple of years at one called MyBetzCo that started out okay but died because none of the members would make public posts for interacting with others.
What do you recommend for private/decentralizwd clouds, socmeds or media sites?
I totally agree with you and this is the opportunity to call on the tech savy who are here. There’s a lot of people like OP, like me, drenched in frustration, because we realize we are the product, but we don’t have the strength and the knowledge to emancipate ourself from this position of semilliterate. Yes, you could say: just study, but when one works the time, having some organized free time is the Neverland. I think it’d be something memorable, that will endure times if people of good fill could put together some sort of wikipedia that explains simply how to come back to be a user, or even better an explorer and not just a product.
I know there’s something like but I do not have the skills to install it. I do have a proton account, I use DDG, mozilla firefox and I tend to use f-droid for every app, before going to Google play to download what I need.
I began to pay for the Internet services or make donations (small ones) to organizations who are respectful toward the person and bring/offer interesting contents to the net (Intercept.
But what misses is the will to communicate and literate people like us that suffer the Internet without having to tools to take back our right to be just a curious person who want to wander through the world rather than into a mega mall center.