With a privacy protecting setup, the mainstream internet is almost unusable. To sign up for social media or even a gmail account, one has to provide a phone number for verification. Youtube doesn’t work when not signed into a Google account, or if one is connected to a VPN. Even downloader programs like yt-dlp and freyr have been rendered useless by the strict access controls of the major platforms. There is a vast amount of community, DIY, and educational material of all sorts behind these platform walls, so how can someone who doesn’t want to be tracked access any of it these days?
There are alternatives like archive.org and peertube which are wonderful but have nowhere near the amount of content that people have been uploading to YouTube over the years. For example, if I need to fix a washing machine and there is a tutorial on YouTube, how can I see it while still preserving a modicum of privacy online?
Yeah, content is quickly being hidden behind all sorts of walls, and even governments are now passing laws to render content inaccessible without ID verification
I have just come to accept that the internet has shrunk. I liked it better back when it was smaller anyway. But it is frustrating whenever I have a problem that has been carefully solved by some random person on Reddit or some middle aged man on YouTube 20 years ago, only for it to be rendered inaccessible without giving up all kinds of privacy.
Yes, it seems wrong that now Google, one of the biggest companies of all time and one under a hostile regime, controls access to knowledge and information that individuals all around the world have worked together to compile over decades. Looking back now that we know about enshitification, we should have been more careful.
I long for the days of dumbphones. I’m seriously considering going dumb again. I hate this modern age and day we live in.