Yes! I’ve been ‘degoogling’ for a while. Shifted email, searching, shopping etc elsewhere.

However, Cory Doctorow (‘Enshittification’) points out that even if you’re the advertiser or business customer, you’re the product. They get screwed as well. Companies that are too big to care are extracting value from everyone. The policy decisions that allowed them to get that way were made in living memory by named individuals, and can be reversed.

Yup. Guess who’s doing the ID work - Persona. Yes the Persona that has the code to route every face scan via US checks. ‘Governance’ via coercion and control. ‘The beatings will continue until social cohesion improves.’ They’re all jealous of China. And we have no sovereignty. We’re full of US software and doing whatever ‘Five Eyes’ wants.

They know how dangerous AI is for cybersecurity and they’re just pushing it through anyway and expecting engineers to deal with it. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/must-act-now-to-counter-ai-borne-cyber-attacks-five-eyes-says-626815

Andy Burnham is in favour of the social media ban in the UK, and we continue to roll forward: 10 Dec 2025 No accounts for under-16s; ‘reasonable steps’ to detect and remove underage accounts 9 Mar 2026 ‘Age assurance’, i.e. ID check for adult sites 27 Jun 2026 ‘Age assurance’, i.e. ID check, for all search engines Dec 2026 Private companies can be accredited as part of the Digital ID system. Oh we’re so ready. Nothing bad will happen.

You might want to encourage your friends to get Mastodon accounts. Mastodon is federated like Lemmy, and there’s a mastodon.au instance. There’s a beginners guide here: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-use-mastodon-social-beginners-guide

What you’re seeing is called ‘enshittification’. In this particular example, in 2019, Prabhakar Raghavan – the ex-McKinsey, ex-Yahoo MBA who ran ad revenue for Google – came up with an ingenious solution: just make search worse. If you have to run multiple searches to find what you’re looking for, that creates multiple chances to show you an ad. No really. This is real. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Why do people put up with this? You can find out more about enshittification here:

Short explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE

Longer explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZaoWpQ-3Zs

Book: https://craphound.com/shop/

I’m going to have a difficult time calling Gina ‘Your Majesty’. She seems more like a Grand Poobah. I guess her official title is Gina the Hutt? Still love the painting. I wonder what thought bubble she’ll fart out next for her minions to smilingly inhale.