I fuckin' signed in to YouTube with my existing account damn it
this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
299 points (94.9% liked)
Privacy
37512 readers
705 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It took them less than a decade to make us accept this new order online. From 2010 to 2015 more or less.
Personally, I miss when online communities were places where you shared things you found online. I miss when it was a place where you could personalize your profiles and where people still enjoyed reading blogs and things like that.
I miss when the internet was for people and not for corporations.
It was scary back then too, with pedos, hackers and so on, but it does hit differently when corporations are in control of how we interact with one another and they get to set the rules for what they can demand of you before connecting you with their platforms.
I do hope that someday this corporate chokehold on the internet will collapse and we will see a revival of true free and creative "social media" like it used to be. I miss the blogs and the forums and the art sharing sites that didn't suck ass like they do nowadays.
Totally agree on the pre-2010 internet being more human. Now not only the platforms are centralized, half of the blogs you find are now AI generated incoherent garbage.
There is still good stuff, but now you have to work really hard to find it among AI slop, Ads, paywalls etc.
I hope the fediverse can establish a new form of the old internet. Lemmy instances are now the self hosted phpBB forums of this decade. And even on the corporate platforms there are some thriving niche communities.
Maybe it was just that the pre-2010 internet was driven primarily by nerds of some form. With the smartphone it went fully mainstream, and that broke it. It got streamlined and commodified and monetized to turn any kind of "engagement" into profits, instead of, well, just being a place where many random quirky people are doing their thing and sharing cool stuff.
Remember when "Homepage" was still a concept? Now I guess for most people it's their Instagram profile, or something like that.