Ah, yeah that’s a yikes

I’m not too worried at the moment. Lemmy is much newer and smaller than the social networks we’re all used to, as well as being an open source social network. It makes a lot of sense that this site attracts a lot of like-minded people to it. Hopefully as more people join, we’ll see more open (respectful) discussion.

On the flipside, the more people join Lemmy, the bigger of a target it’ll be for bot farms and zone-flooding shenanigans, so maybe its smaller size and appeal to specific kinds of people isn’t the worst thing in the world either?

I always heard about Spotify ripping off artists and thought “well, it can’t be worse than YouTube’s random demonetisations, can it?” but what’s this about it shilling for ICE?

I think the first place I stopped using was Amazon way back in COVID times or earlier! I don’t think there was any specific thing they did, there just wasn’t anything they had that eBay, Onbuy or Argos didn’t have, and I don’t like to support monopolies if I can avoid it. In retrospect I’m very glad I stopped using it!

A couple of years after that I stopped using Google and changed to Mojeek and Qwant, when I heard that decent Google alternatives existed.

A few years later came Xitter. I sort of got peer-pressured into getting Twitter back in the day, I used it as an art dump, and didn’t really feel any personal connection to it, so I didn’t really feel bad about deleting it the exact day Musk bought it.

In the last year or so I’ve started to get serious about alternative tech. After working with Linux for about two years, I finally installed Ubuntu when Windows 10 became end of life last year, I deleted Instagram, I deleted Facebook, I deleted Reddit, and I deleted Whatsapp all within a couple of months of each other!

A few days ago my phone broke, which gave me the perfect opportunity to order a Fairphone (Linux) phone instead of using Android! I’m really proud of this one, because 99% of phones are specifically made to only run with one operating system, either Android or iOS. That means you can’t just install Linux on any phone the way you can with desktops and laptops, making transitioning into a Linux phone way more expensive.

The main thing I can’t seem to shake is YouTube, but even that’s been significantly cut down in favour of watching Peertube and my DVD collection!

Obviously it depends on what you buy from there, but personally I find Amazon one of the easiest places to avoid, and one of the first places I’ve started avoiding. I’ve just been substituting it with eBay and Onbuy, and so far there’s nothing Amazon has that they don’t.

Yeah, in theory I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it as a term of phrase, I just think that in practice there are so many people saying it who I wouldn’t trust to pinpoint societal problems

You might recognise a soyjak if you see one, even if you wouldn’t know the name of them. It was based off another meme (wojaks) and took off alongside the COVID-era conspiracy theories. It’s actually interesting that you can notice how the early ones just had a couple of nerdy traits, like a Nintendo Switch, some glasses, and some facial hair, but as it became less of a meme and more of a propaganda technique, they had to become uglier and uglier to clarify that they represented the “wrong opinion”

For me it’s the term “that’s what’s wrong with society” and variations of it. There are a LOT of things wrong with society, and different countries, cities and regions have totally different problems. If you boil all these problems down to one thing, it’s probably because you’re obsessed with that one thing, not because it’s actually caused all these other problems.

I view it as the right wing equivalent of a soyjak. A derogatory name (and drawing) for someone who’s terminally online and politically obsessed.

The Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared TV show!