It’s a gigantic money sink, it’s going to be extremely hard to come up with a profitable (or break even) alternative.

I stopped using LinkedIn because it totally turned into Facebook. Everyone is just posting memes, motivation quotes or soccer.

Nah, your ISP doesn’t give you enough bandwidth to host your own mini YouTube. You vastly underestimate the bandwidth required to run the service. It’s massive, which is why PeerTube is having a hard time gaining traction.

Serious question: how can YouTube pay the bills with zero ads? I’m not talking about making a profit, just breaking even.

Except content creators want to create content, not maintain an instance.

Switching to more private and less data hungry services is a tough process. How private do you want to be? If you take it too far, you won’t have a cell phone or a bank account.

Carefully consider the changes you are willing make right now. Start small, progress slowly. Don’t get discouraged and remember that total privacy doesn’t exist.

Start by swapping search engine, don’t use Google or Bing. That’s an easy goal that already makes a big difference. Use something like Duck duck go, Startpage or something like that.

Eventually move away from gmail. Get your own domain, create your own email address. Slowly migrate your important accounts to the new email. This can take time but it’s not hard and you just removed the 2 largest sources of data from Google.

Stop using Chrome, try Firefox. Personally recommend LibreWolf, a Firefox fork. At the very least move to Brave browser (but make sure you disable the crypto crap). Most extensions exist in both browsers this should easy.

Eventually consider moving to Linux but don’t rush it. Study what apps you need, what alternatives are there in Linux. Expect a way worse user experience but a way way better ownership. Try in a VM or live environment before you even consider installing it for real.

Last week I installed Windows 11 on a new laptop that came with FreeDOS installed. It was a really dreadful experience, I never thought it was this bad.

• The windows 11 installer couldn’t find any hhd partitions or hard drive, while FreeDOS could. After googling for a while I had to download an Intel Rapid Something driver from the manufacturer’s website and load it up when installing windows 11.

• After installing Windows it required an internet connection to proceed but I assume the wi-fi drivers were not installed. USB tethering didn’t seem to be working either so I had to continue the setup elsewhere, where I had physical access to the router.

• I had to skip a lot of things throughout the installer, which kinda shocked me. Office 365 and even games, before I even booted the actual OS.

• Fully updating Windows took 2 hours. Fresh ISO, gigabit Ethernet connection, nvme HDD. Damn.

Pretty miserable experience and completely impossible to an unexperienced user.

Having free and open source software is not enough for some people. The dev needs to publish it in a Foss platform, use a Foss operative system, a Foss ide, mild political views. Free, quality and high maintained software is not good enough these days. /s