There’s nothing that can express my disdain for Google’s reCaptcha.

😒 We’re training its AI models 😒 It’s free labor for Google 😒 Sometimes it wants the corner of an object, sometimes it doesn’t 😒 Wildly inconsistent 😒 Always blurry and hard to see 😒 Seemingly endless 😒 It’s the robot asking us humans if we’re the robots

Yeah, it’s only an aggregator that then points you to the original content. For legal reasons, I don’t think OpenSourcely would be able to host the original content natively.

I started a website called OpenSourcely to do exactly this.

It aggregates news, projects, and announcements related to open source.

I’m always on the lookout for new RSS feeds and outlets to add to it, so if anyone has any, feel free to send them my way.

Thoughts and takeaways, plus 3 viable solutions:

Thoughts

1️⃣ I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Enshittification might be a good thing. Here’s why

I don’t “like” that things have gotten this bad, but I do like that the worse things get, the more we can collectively organize and pressure reform to fix these things.

2️⃣ These tests are usually run on relatively small subsets of the user base. Remember when they rolled out hiding likes? That was rolled out periodically as well.

They typically also run different types of user bases. They already know the hardcore “influencers” and people who have built a public following will never leave the platform, since they’re too invested already, and are the people/publications that contribute the most to network effects. I.e., you’re on there because they’re on there.

3️⃣ Remember when Tim Kendall (former executive at Facebook) says that they talked about Zuckerberg having ultimate control over these 3 distinct goals?

1. Engagement: Drive up your usage. Keep you scrolling, liking, commenting, and remaining active on the platform.
2. Growth: Encouraging you to keep coming back and inviting your friends, and getting them to invite their friends, and so on.
3. Advertising: Make sure that as growth and engagement are happening, advertising revenue is maximized.

That’s what’s happening here—this is dial #3 being turned up.

Solutions

1. The most obvious: Delete your account

I know, I know—network effects are tough to break.

Tell your friends and family to delete theirs. Make yourself unreachable on Facebook-owned platforms.

Most people are posting less as traditional posts, and more as stories. If stories is your thing, Signal has stories. This is a really secure, private, and still convenient way to share whatever you want throughout the day.

If your favorite restaurant changes your dish’s recipe, you’d prolly stop going, right? Well, that recipe’s been changing, and we continue to put up with it despite an increasingly worse product.

2. For those looking for an alternative: Use Pixelfed

It doesn’t have nearly the same type of content or user base size that Instagram does. But the same way that we built Facebook little by little, the same can be done for healthier alternative platforms.

This might also help your reduction in using social media, if you’re looking for that.

3. For those who can’t/will never leave Instagram: Use an open source native mobile app (Android-specific)

If you have an Android-based mobile operating system, there are apps like MyInsta and Instander that give you a native Instagram experience while blocking all of the ads.

They also have app-specific settings that allow you to customize your Instagram experience even further, such as (but limited to):

• Downloading photos/reels/entire carousels
• Reduces data sent to Instagram (analytics, ads, and other requests)
• Ghost mode
• Block reels, posts, stories, explore, comments, or whatever else
• Tons more

I run a basketball media outlet (InThePaintCrew) and a lifestyle/photography page (LifeViaChicago), and being able to modify the experience to remove the noise/clutter when a native Instagram app is needed is helpful.

Lol it was the other way around… I actually added a word instead. Fixed

now.

Fixed it, thanks for flagging

Nice, thanks. Your site is really clean. Dig it.

Glad you like it.

And yeah, it’s foundational. We tolerate things digitally that we’d never tolerate in person.

Once I start connecting and analogizing digital to physical concepts in a conversation, it appears to “click” in their heads and they end up saying something along the lines of, “You’re right. It makes sense.”

Hence this project. I hope people can use this website and link it to people who need it to understand how this affects us all—now, not in the future.

Not the first time facial recognition tech has been misused, and certainly won’t be the last. The UK in particular has caught a lotta flak around this.

We seem to have a hard time connecting the digital world to the physical world and realizing just how interwoven they are at this point.

Therefore, I made an open source website called idcaboutprivacy to demonstrate the importance—and dangers—of tech like this.

It’s a list of news articles that demonstrate real-life situations where people are impacted.

If you wanna contribute to the project, please do. I made it simple enough to where you don’t need to know Git or anything advanced to contribute to it. (I don’t even really know Git.)

We gonna see a GoldeneOS?

Cases like these are why this extension exists: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/don-t-fuck-with-paste/

Nonprofit news organizations. The Markup has a very public-interest technology approach, and is most well-known for it’s Blacklight tool.

This is why enshittification might be a good thing ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Canva.

Their feature set and functionality is great, but their vendor lock-in is really off-putting. Even just within their platform, it’s really difficult to move assets around within workspaces.

Let alone edit graphics that you made on Canva and edit them elsewhere, say Penpot, for example.

At least you can say the experience was lit

For those of us who can’t code their own extensions: LibRedirect does this for other sites as well, not just YouTube.

“Being simple’s a yes, being skilled is a not/ Having substance is lame, using substance is hot”

“Been public enemy since you thought ‘PE’ was gym, biiiitch!”

Nope. I suppose in theory it could, but not necessarily—it’d be up to Apple/Google to make the color decisions regarding that.

The important thing here is that it’s not about the colors themselves, but about what the colors signify.

Apple chose blue to denote that the message you’re sending is to another Apple device. By default, this Apple-to-Apple message uses the iMessage protocol. If it uses iMessage, then that implies a certain security standard.

Apple also made the deliberate choice to denote non-iMessage texts with green. If it’s green, then it’s SMS/MMS, you lose iMessage encryption, and other features like reactions.

The colors are not gonna change by default—it’s up to them to coordinate what colors are used for what. Apple’s not gonna open up iMessage (at least not voluntarily, and we saw how far they’ll go with Beeper), so Google can’t do anything about that. Which is also why they’re pushing so hard to get Apple to adopt RCS.

If Apple does adopt RCS, maybe they’ll denote it with purple bubbles, who knows. Then you’d have iMessage as blue, RCS as purple, and SMS/MMS as green.

But again, this is all about what each color signifies in terms of privacy and security.

The thing is… The bubble colors do matter. But people aren’t caring about the colors for the right reasons.

The color matters because the color has to do with the security of that message.

Sending a message through the iMessage protocol is more secure than SMS/MMS.

People should care that their messages are secure and private (and they do care, they just don’t always realize it or know it yet). Unfortunately, the people behind the whole blue vs. green bubble culture war don’t seem to focus on this security aspect, which is actually what/why it matters.

As an Apple investor who would benefit from more iPhone sales, “Buy an iPhone” is not the right response/solution to this problem, despite what Tim Apple says.

Choose open source. Say no to walled gardens.

Use—and donate to—Signal.

Greetings from GrapheneOS, as a former iOS and stock Android user.