No matter how hard we all wish it were otherwise, the sad fact is that there aren't really individual solutions to systemic problems. For example: your personal diligence in recycling will have no meaningful impact on the climate emergency.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
1/
I get it. People write to me all the time, they say, "What can I change about my life to fight enshittification, or, at the very least, to reduce the amount of enshittification that I, personally, experience?"
It's frustrating, but my general answer is, "Join a movement. Get involved with a union, with @eff, with the @fsf. Tell your Congressional candidate to defend Lina Khan from billionaire Dem donors who want her fired. Do something *systemic*."
2/
There's very little you can do as a consumer. You're not going to shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. Now that Amazon has destroyed most of the brick-and-mortar *and* digital stores out of business, boycotting Amazon often just means doing without.
3/
The collective action problem of leaving Twitter or Facebook is so insurmountable that you end up stuck there, with a bunch of people you love and rely on, who all love each other, all hate the platform, but can't agree on a day and time to leave or a destination to leave *for* and so end up stuck there.
4/
I've been experiencing some challenging stuff in my personal life lately and yesterday, I just found myself unable to deal with my usual podcast fare so I tuned into the videos from the very last @xoxo, in search of uplifting fare:
https://www.youtube.com/@xoxofest
I found it. Talks by Dan Olson, @cabel, @edyong209 and many others, especially @molly0xfff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTaeVVAvk-c
5/
Molly's talk was so, so good, but when I got to her call to action, I found myself pulling a bit of a face:
> But the platforms do not exist without the people, and there are a lot more of us than there are of them. The platforms have installed themselves in a position of power, but they are also vulnerable...
6/
Are the platforms *really* that vulnerable? The collective action problem is *so* hard, the switching costs are *so* high - maybe the fact that "there's a lot more of us than there are of them" is a bug, not a feature. The more of us there are, the thornier our collective action problem and the higher the switching costs, after all.
7/
And then I had a realization: the conduit through which I experience Molly's excellent work *is* totally enshittification-proof, and the more I use it, the easier it is for *everyone* to be less enshittified.
This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power.
It's RSS.
8/
RSS (one of those internet acronyms with multiple definitions, including"Really Simple Syndication") is an invisible, automatic way for internet-connected systems to public "feeds." For example, rather than reloading the @WIRED homepage every day and trying to figure out which stories are new (their layout makes this *very* hard to do!), you can just sign up for *Wired*'s RSS feed, and use an RSS reader to monitor the site and preview new stories the moment they're published.
9/
*Wired* pushes about 600 words from each article into that feed, stripped of the usual stuff that makes *Wired* nearly impossible to read: no 20-second delay subscription pop-up, text in a font and size of your choosing. You can follow *Wired*'s feed without any cookies, and *Wired* gets no information about which of its stories you read. *Wired* doesn't even get to know that you're monitoring its feed.
10/
I don't mean to pick on *Wired* here. This goes for every news source I follow - from CNN to the *New York Times*. But RSS isn't just good for the news! It's good for *everything*. Your friends' blogs? Every blogging platform emits an RSS feed by default. You can follow every one of them in your reader.
Not just blogs. Do you follow a bunch of substackers or other newsletters? They've *all* got RSS feeds.
11/
You can read those newsletters without ever registering in the analytics of the platforms that host them. The text shows up in black and white (not the sadistic, 8-point, 80% grey-on-white type these things all default to). It is *always* delivered, without any risk of your email provider misclassifying an update as spam:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/
Did you know that, by default, your email sends information to mailing list platforms about your reading activity?
12/
The platform gets to know if you opened the message, and often how far along you've read in it. On top of that, they get all the private information your browser or app leaks about you, including your location. This is *unbelievably* gross, and you get to bypass *all* of it, just by reading in RSS.
13/
Are your friends too pithy for a newsletter, preferring to quip on social media? Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to get an RSS feed from Insta/FB/Twitter, but all those new ones that have popped up? They all have feeds. You can follow any Mastodon account (which means you can follow any Threads account) via RSS. Same for Bluesky. That also goes for older platforms, like Tumblr and Medium. There's RSS for @HackerNewsBot, and there's a sub-feed for the comments on every story.
14/
You can get RSS feeds for the Fedex, UPS and USPS parcels you're awaiting, too.
Your local politician's website probably has an RSS feed. Ditto your state and national reps. There's an RSS feed for each federal agency (the FCC has a great blog!).
15/
Your RSS reader lets you put all these feeds into folders if you want. You can even create automatic folders, based on keywords, or even things like "infrequently updated sites" (I follow a bunch of people via RSS who only update a couple times per year - cough, @danny, cough - and never miss a post).
Your RSS reader doesn't (necessarily) have an algorithm. By default, you'll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.
16/
Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you *asked* to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.
17/
Now, you sign up to so many feeds that you're feeling overwhelmed and you *want* an algorithm to prioritize posts - or recommend content. Lots of RSS readers have some kind of algorithm and recommendation system (I use @newsblur, which offers both, though I don't use them - I *like* the glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of the undifferentiated firehose feed).
18/
But *you* control the algorithm, *you* control the recommendations. And if a new RSS reader pops up with an algorithm you're dying to try, you can export all the feeds you follow with a single click, which will generate an OPML file. Then, with one click, you can import that OPML file into *any other RSS reader in existence* and all your feeds will be seamlessly migrated there. You can delete your old account, or you can even use different readers for different purposes.
19/
You can access RSS in a browser or in an app on your phone (most RSS readers have an app), and they'll sync up, so a story you mark to read later on your phone will be waiting for you the next time you load up your reader in a browser tab, and you won't see the same stories twice (unless you want to, in which case you can mark them as unread).
20/
RSS basically works like social media *should* work. Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking *any* personal information through the simple act of reading.
21/
@pluralistic I deeply sympathize but man, these recommendations are far too 90s-centric. I still like some people at the EFF but the FSF is a remarkably ineffective organization. They do stuff like hold IRC meetings to debate which packages deserve to be listed in their Free Software Directory. And I would not recommend any young woman get involved with the FSF.
I wish I had alternatives to offer - many inspiring individuals out there but few projects ready for mass participation
October 14th, 2024 Richard Stallman (aka “RMS”) is the founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation and present-day voting member of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors and “Chief GNUisance” of the GNU project. He is responsible for innumerable contributions to the free software movement, setting its guiding principles, organizing political action, and directly contributing to a flourishing free software ecosystem. The majority of Stallman’s political activity has been of priceless value to society at large.
@pluralistic You may not need a separate app for RSS.
#RSS is available by default in the #Mozilla #Thunderbird #email client. #RTFM
@pluralistic funny enough, I just got fed up by the enshittification of Reddit and realised that all I need it for is as a link aggregator.
So what I did is hosting freshrss as a rss aggregator and subscribe mostly to the sources directly.
With freshrss I can filter and categorise myself, and while reddits official rss feeds link to Reddit, it should be theoretically possible to fish out the real links from their json feed. Until they shut that down too.
Less toxicity now and more info.
@pluralistic I'm a huge fan of RSS feeds for news and blogs and updates and alerts.
Don't forget that RSS also drives the entire core podcast distribution system.
If you are tired of Spotify or Apple or whomever enshittifying your podcast listening experience, you can subscribe to your favourite podcasts via RSS and download them locally using good ole desktop software.
Bringolo
Cory Doctorow
Dan Hon
Jerome
Neil Kandalgaonkar
LeBonk
Ölbaum
axel.
Led By Gilded Fools
CassandraVert
EmbraceBecoming
TubbDoose
Lucyinchat
MrMozz
GraniteGeek
Globaltom
Beutlin
Wulfy—Speaker to the machines
Dark Sage Torunka 
Philip Kiff
Brian
Lorraine Lee
Teri Yaki 🖌️🎹🚲💻
tecleandor