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Stop the segragation of people. Stop beeing compartementalized by yourself or the media. Don't get into a trench fight between leftist and rightists. Be yourself and don't think of yourself as a part of a certain group of people. You are an individual and while you might share several interests or opinions with a certain group, you always have to do the thinking yourself. Otherwise you might just end up getting instrumentalized. Often so without even noticing it. You're just another useful idiot then. Having the backup of like-minded people is nice to have but you should never let their hate and fanatic views take control over your actions or believes. So if you really want to change something, you should never hate the people who have a different view on things. They might just have been getting instrumentalized by others.
Instead of hating them, start teaching them. Share your opinion with those people. Especially with those that don't reflect your way of thinking because they might recognize what a truly inspirational, righteous and great personality you are and maybe start to rethink their own view on things because of that. Because of you. I love you!
You don't need to be connected to anyone within the same app. You only need to be connected to the people that matter in general. Putting it this way, you can have closed gr
Even smilies have been centralized. By forcing the usage of emojis on users of mobile phones the use of predefined emojis has skyrocketed. While some emojis are nice to look at and some are useful as well, most of them just look bland and soulless.
Why the centralization of the web is bad for the people
Having billions of people using your service makes you prone to act like a dictator. You don't have to care about losing 100.000 people here, 300.000 people there when there are billions of users attached to your service. The leadership or the development teams may make decisions, that scare away a certain type of user.
These big companies, their leaders and decision makers, even their development teams are constantly under the influence of lobbyism. They are influenced by politicians, state authorities, their userbase (in particular the loudest factions) and many more. So even when they would like to act in the best interest of all users - This isn't going to happen as intended. Having different teams in a company always comes with the risk of having teams working against each other, trying to force their ideas upon others and realize them against all odds. The most influential groups or persons in a company can have an impact but so do the people around them.
I would consider big tech companies to be as much of a interest to several lobbyist-circles as the politicians on a state level because Big Tech and their centralized hubs on the internet have a lot of power. The power to influence the public view on things and events. The power to discrimate or favor several factions, interest groups and to push the agenda of - Well, whoever asks or pays for it or has the means to influence the decision making process in these big tech companies in any given way. This said, the centralized web has become a propaganda dream of countries, companies, politcal parties as well as extremist groups.
Big tech holds the power to censor the contents they decide should be censored. They can shadowban the opposition, shadowban a politcal party that is not in favor of them. You can imagine what else can get censored or banned. They make the rules what users are allowed to post on their platforms. They decide when the ban hammer will strike down on any given subject with vengeance.
Political interest groups can target a young audience and literally force them to watch content, that is made to manipulate their view on things. To me, this is very concerning. On the other hand, propaganda has been in use for like forever, I don't know. The medium of transportation of the propaganda messages has changed over the centuries. So is the usage of Big Tech Media worse than reading a Newspaper? Most newspapers aren't neutral in general too. They reflect a certain political view on things and this is done by employing people that fit their ideology or agenda. So Newspapers basically feature the view of the faction or interest groups they represent, may it be leftist or rightist or whatever sides vision it focuses on. This has to do with the people who own the newspaper, their political view on things or only the agenda they follow at the moment. The people who book ads and financiers of the newspaper in general as well hold some power regarding how the articles will come out in the end.
It's the same with television. Once the independent smaller stations get annected by bigger companies, the view on things that gets broadcasted to the public shrinks. It gets more and more homogenetic. You can actually see a good example of this when you look at the US media landscape for TV broadcasters. Right now there are more or less only 5 big players around that swallowed nearly all smaller broadcasting stations. The power they have to influence the public is gigantic. But more and more users turn away from traditional TV, especially the younger generations.
Thats what they need social media and big tech in general for. The big companies, the political parties, the state needs social media to keep on pumping out their propaganda to the masses.
It always has been like that but the medium is about to change drastically. Newspaper sales are in decline, so is television usage in general. The younger audience seems to live a life on the internet. Thats why they need big tech to fill this slot.
I'm not anti social media. I don't use it in my private life. I'm fine with anybody using Big Tech in general. It's everybodys personal choice. But people have to know about the dangers as well.
Why centralized hosting is bad
Don't get me wrong from the beginning. I love th concept of neocities or nekoweb. I love people who offer free guestbook hosting or hosting a forum for other people for free. That's great! However, having one of these services getting shut down resolves in a total mess for the users. Most services are shut down without a warning or a very late one. A lot of times people can't download "their" data resulting in a loss. A loss of guestbook entries, a loss of webring members. A loss of thousands or tens of thousands of websites at the same time in case a free web hosting services goes down.
The reasons an admin wants to shutdown his domain / webspace / server / services can be many. Loss of interest, becoming financially unstable, getting pressured by people, groups, the state. An admin can become Ill or die and their family doesn't care, doesn't have the ability to take care or may just dont know about what the admin did and that he was offering a nice service, trusted and used by many people out there. They just shutdown the domain.
Security risks involved
When using 3rd party scripts that are hosted elsewhere and you embed these into your website, you have lost control over your website already. You have no control about the code that gets loaded by the 3rd party script. Could be malicious, could be fine. You don't know. Even if you trust the person who made the script / is hosting it - Imagine his/hers site is shut down. The domain isn't paid anymore. It starts showing up on an expired domains list or gets put on auction. Now a bad actor sees the chance of having hundreds or thousands or even more websites helping him to distribute a malicious payload? Some script for adfraud or an ddos attack vector. They can infect other peoples computer when they are visiting gyour site, on your domain or subdomain. Who do you think will they blame for?
What will the big search engines do when they discover that your website is distributing malware?
That's why I always recommend to self-host anything! Make backups at least now and then. Store them in a secure way and just keep your data tight. It belongs to you!
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