Four levers to fight enshittification:

  • bring back antitrust laws

  • better regulation of tech business

  • tech workers must unionize

  • interoperability is a must (required by law)

(summary by prinlu)

  • hash@slrpnk.net
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    12 days ago

    Wow bigleagues for Doctorow was not on my bingo card. Check out his talks if you haven’t but also don’t sleep on his fiction.

  • 4am@lemmy.zip
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    12 days ago

    He mentions mastodon and doesn’t mention that ActivityPub already makes this interoperability possible ?

    • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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      12 days ago

      He covered a lot already for the normie crowd. Also, I think he meant like forcing Facebook to have an open API and allow unrestricted interoperability no matter what “network” an end user is on.

    • ManualOverride@slrpnk.net
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      12 days ago

      He may just talk like that, but I think Doctorow is going through, as comprehensively as his allotted time slot will allow, the talking points he and the host have prepared beforehand. Keeping this in mind and taking into account the audience likely doesn’t know what a “protocol” is, I think it’s fine that he doesn’t mention ActivityPub. Perhaps he mentions it in his book. I’ll check it out if it lands in my local library’s bookshelves.

  • ManualOverride@slrpnk.net
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    12 days ago

    Before we can (and want to) get tech workers to unionize, there needs to be a shift in culture in the tech industry. Right-wing libertarian ideals are very prevalent in tech, especially in Silicon Valley. This has been the case for years and has already greatly influenced tech legislation in the United States and the world. Class solidarity is almost non-existent at a lot of big tech firms.

    That being said, there are of course many tech workers who understand the importance of the class struggle and who are ready to organize. I’ll add some links to the tech workers coalition and to a podcast which unveils a lot of the hidden politics of the tech industry, tech won’t save us.

    On another note, interoperability naturally arises from well designed and largely adopted open standards.

  • activistPnk@slrpnk.net
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    12 days ago

    What is he doing in Youtube? No peertube? I actually cannot reach his video due to anti-Invidious enshitification.

    IIRC, someone posted a link to his book here recently and there was some enshitification in the way.

      • activistPnk@slrpnk.net
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        8 days ago

        My main point was to expose hypocrisy by Doctorow.

        As far as the practical nuts and bolts of dealing with it, Newpipe and yt-dlp were both useful front-ends before Google started blocking Tor. Now that Google blocks tor, what’s the advantage? I think they may be ad-free, just like Invidious, but Google still gets to do recon on you with your IP exposed.

        Of course peertube is the best. No privacy-hostile surveillance advertising to play a cat-mouse game with. It’s where C.D. should be.

        • gringoaleatorio@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          I’d better have him exposed to a greater audience than preaching for a bunch of already converted fans

          Plus I don’t think he gets to choose where the Daily Show post anything.

          Also not sure about your points about NewPipe. It only fetches video and channel info, without using the Google API or the need of you being logged into yt, so it’s still pretty good when in comes to privacy.

          • activistPnk@slrpnk.net
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            8 days ago

            Plus I don’t think he gets to choose where the Daily Show post anything.

            I was not sure why you mentioned The Daily Show considering a fedi user links to Youtube… then I noticed that in the title. If this is a snip from the daily show about CD, then indeed it was out of CD’s control. Lately it takes a lot to motivate me to try to get a YT video - so I have not seen that video.

            I’d better have him exposed to a greater audience than preaching for a bunch of already converted fans

            This is a moot point if CD did not put anything on YT. But if CD were to publish a video for outreach, then RMS’s Facebook advice applies. That is, the proper way to do this is to put the full non-enshitified video on peertube. Then in Google’s Youtube post a partial version of the video, like a movie trailer, that ends with directing people to Peertube for the full version. Then all links should go to Peertube, not Youtube. And the Youtube metadata should link to Peertube but there should not be a link from Peertube to Youtube. It should be a 1-way reference so Youtubers can find the content but everyone else goes straight to the freedom-respecting place.

            Also not sure about your points about NewPipe. It only fetches video and channel info, without using the Google API or the need of you being logged into yt, so it’s still pretty good when in comes to privacy.

            If that were true, Tor would not be blocked. Newpipe is just a front-end. From github:

            NewPipe works by fetching the required data from the official API (e.g. PeerTube) of the service you’re using. If the official API is restricted (e.g. YouTube) for our purposes, or is proprietary, the app parses the website or uses an internal API instead.

            Newpipe still depends on Google’s server. If Google’s server goes offline, Newpipe is dead. Google still gets your IP address and sees what you do. Invidious can do better than that because it’s possible to configure Invidious as a proxy. But Google can still fuck with Invidious instances (and they do) so we’re stuffed anyway.

            Hence my recent post calling for a solution: App to torrent swarm Youtube videos and opportunistically do yt-dlp in parallel.

            • gringoaleatorio@lemmy.world
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              7 days ago

              If the official API is restricted (…), the app parses the website or uses an internal API instead

              This is fine to me. Tor frontend or not, you could not access anything if google services went down. I’m all for people putting content on other platforms, but for now for consuming content from youtube I’m ok with adopting this solution.

              Now, if you want to go on with a project that massively mirrors youtube, feel free!

              • activistPnk@slrpnk.net
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                4 days ago

                This is fine to me.

                Along with most of the Google boot-licking world. For those with principled objections to feeding Google, it’s not okay.

                Tor frontend or not, you could not access anything if google services went down.

                This depends on whether the proxy caches videos. Certainly with Newpipe you are hosed because it does not even have a proxy option.

                I’m all for people putting content on other platforms, but for now for consuming content from youtube I’m ok with adopting this solution.

                This is because you’ve settled with feeding Google, which enables Google to get away with their oppressions like their recent lockout of both the Tor community and the Invidious community. It’s not an acceptable option from a digital sovereignty standpoint.