I think unlike Google, there are still many pure engineers that need to contribute to open source to be motivated and are still have some power.
I feel, but I am not sure, that for Google, thing have switched more and faster to the side of Big soulless corps.
Generally speaking my experience is that even in these big soulless corps there are positive and passionate people. But quite often they do not have enough decision power to have a positive impact.
matrix with element as client.
If you really care about privacy you can hist a matrix server without much resources needed.
I feel that I see more and more articles that give the false impression that rich are the only people we should put a pressure for pollution. This will give more and more people the illusion that they can pollute because their pollution is very minor compared to the pollution of the rich.
The reality is while richer people pollute more. The ratio of pollution between a rich and a normal person is not comparable to the ratio of the wealth difference.
In fact, for pollution, everyone effort has a real effect.
More precisely I read an article that made it clear that if a super rich has 100000x more money, they will pollute directly only 40x more than most people. (the number are probably wrong but the order of magnitude is correct).
This mean that pollution is not just for the rich, but for everyone. And your personal effort count.
I don’t see how this could be prevented.
There are already many “small web” movements. With different proposals. Like gemini, sub-set of currently supported web standards (typically no-js, no-css, no POST, etc…)
But the monetized web is doomed to reach a point were it will be controlled in such a way that you will not be able to block ads, not be able to hide your pseudonymous identity.
I remember reading an article many years ago about the cat and mouse game between ads publishers and ad-blockers. The conclusion were that in the end, ads blocker will lose the final war. And with these kind of system we are closer and closer to reach it.
I think we need to collectively find a way to have sub-nets. For example declare that our website conform to certain sub-net properties.
The small webs are different for everyone. It would be very nice if we could put an HTML header that would list which small webs pattern this page is compatible with. And have a browser that would adapt to your preferences and also a way to filter your small-web preferences in search engine.
The closest to this we have today is probably gemini. But this a very small but friendly web. I am sure we could find other solutions to create an alternative “respecting his users” web.
If you don’t want to go full Cloudflare you can mitigate DDOS using these kind of technique locally.
https://blog.nginx.org/blog/mitigating-ddos-attacks-with-nginx-and-nginx-plus
Cloudflare will be a lot more effective in case of attack. But I don’t think most people need more than a few mitigation rules. If DDOS really come, there are very few things you could do to mitigate anyway.