this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
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DeGoogle Yourself

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Dark forest web [just venting] (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 week ago by tired_fedora@lemmy.ml to c/degoogle@lemmy.ml
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] tired_fedora@lemmy.ml 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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

[–] MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] tired_fedora@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago

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.