Buggy software, not so user friendly, things don’t work, new things to learn…
Sometimes you just wanna do a simple thing and you cannot do it and that really undermines your self esteem.
You try to find little working solutions when big techs with armies of engeneers and programmers are working against you.
Aurora store stopping to work, apps getting blocked on lineage os or rooted phones, Reddit cleaning out all those amazing third party apps, Linux that wanna make you destroy your pc at times, Firefox remaining the only real alternative to chromium (only god knows for how long yet), google wanting to DRM everything, ig blocking my account because i was using barinsta (i cannot even delete it), Newpipe getting stuck after 1/4 of the video.
Sometimes you find half of your software stops working and you need to go and understand why, fixing or checking for alternatives…
Is it possible that we have from one side mass tracking and surveilance and from the other a (sometimes understandibly quite not organized) series of freely mainteined software.
Can’t we just find a new way of monetize stuff without ads? So that we can build really nicely working software without all the shit that comes from the need of having to track the user? Are there real alternatives? We need to get organized and actually starting to build a better web and software, but i really think an economical incentive is still very much needed for it to be stable and usable by everyone.
Sorry this is more of a rant than a real post, sometimes everything really gets frustrating and you have to deal with much more serious shit in life that doesn’t leave time for checking out why your Newpipe, your gps or home server doesn’t work…
It helps if you can treat it as a hobby. My partner’s hobby is music, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do in one’s spare time. I always feel a bit weird when people ask me what I do in my own spare time and my answer is basically fixing my shit, then pushing it just hard enough that it breaks again.
To your question, the unfortunate reality is that those of us who care about privacy and software freedom are a small minority. Why overhaul your business model to suit us when they can continue to milk every other consumer out there who frankly doesn’t give a shit?
Phones are, of course, the worst of all for this. People do great work developing FOSS solutions but it is an uphill struggle and I worry that the hill is getting steeper.
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