Neko

Getting rid of Apple

Apple is in the same situation as Microsoft and Google, except most of it is in the devices department. While Apple is among the more respectable big tech companies, it still neglects user privacy, gives very little ownership to users in practice and has a fucked up business model that extorts its customers by selling their products for many times more than it costs to make them (1000 Dollars for a screen stand, seriously??!). As such, I also advise you not to use Apple products in the Devices section.

Getting rid of Spotify

Some of you may have heard about how little of your money actually goes to artists by using Spotify. Others may have heard of Spotify investing about 700 million euros into an automated weapons company. Maybe you've even heard of Spotify's lackluster pushback against AI music and bots because it generates them a lot of ad money despite that being considered frauding the advertisers. If you didn't, now you have and you're welcome. First of all, some services you shouldn't be using: don't go back to SoundCloud, they've quietly updated their TOS to allow all music on their platform to be used by them for AI training by default. Napster (very famous before I was born) was acquired some time ago by a company that seems to go all in on AI, so they are quite fittingly using the face of a corpse for their company.

I personally don't use music streaming services, I honestly much prefer having the files themselves (cough you definitely should NOT use YouConvert though cough) as music file sizes tend to be very large. Still, I understand that it's much easier for musicians to protect their art using streaming services. Deezer is a French streaming service and is probably the closest you'll get to Spotify. They are actually doing a lot of work to try and detect AI-generated songs, wipe out the fraudulent streams and ensure AI-generated music is recommended as little as possible. Tidal exists and is quite close as well, but it's owned by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, so you can imagine how predatory their company and business model is. Bandcamp is different from normal streaming services in that you buy indivual albums and songs. Despite the current owner of Bandcamp being a union-busting bastard, Bandcamp itself runs a pretty ethical business model and at least 85% of your money goes to the artists behind the music. Bandcamp is probably the closest to my personal ideal. Pandora only serves in the USA. They've got a business model that runs on ads (targeted ads, mind you) and an ad-free subscription. Don't know much about them or their stance on AI music given that I (luckily) do not live in the USA. Qobuz is another french streaming services and isn't available in a large amount of countries. They pay artists 5x more than other streaming services and don't have as many AI spam on their platform (yet) but they also don't have a filter and tagging system like Deezer. Still, their heart is seemingly in the right place from what I could find on their stance.

Social Media

I'm going to sound like a boomer despite not even being 25 yet. The biggest social media websites/apps based on active users in this day and age are Instagram, TikTok, Twitter (unfortunately), Youtube, Reddit, Discord and Facebook in no particular order (I'm excluding pure chat applications like Snapchat and Whatsapp, those I still have to look into). I hate all of them for a multitude of reasons, but I'll keep it to a few of them: recommendation algorithms, lack of privacy, greed and bots.

The Issues

Recommendation algorithms are nice in theory but pure evil in practice. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI has a very good section explaining how Facebook knowingly engineered their recommendation algorithm to be as polarizing as possible, and knowingly let it get out of hand leading to the Rohingya genocide. It's not just Facebook either, any social media website with a recommendation algorithm tends to have the algorithm trained to maximize engagement, and polarizing content attracts just that unfortunately. It also leads to echo chambers, though that term is being thrown around too loosely. Echo chambers or bubbles aren't a problem if the participants actively know and remember they're in one. We use social media to connect to likeminded people after all. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is that recommendation algorithms and the companies behind them hide the echo chamber from the people who are inside of it. It tries to convince its participants they are always right, because that's the only thing they see. I'm not going to act like an enlightened centrist, sometimes people in an echo chamber are actually correct, but if everyone thinks that way then the truth gets buried all the same.

Privacy issues are simple to explain; these companies just sell your data. Their terms of service take hours to read and by accepting them you give them the right to sell your data to advertisers and to use your data to further tweak their previously mentioned evil recommendation algorithms. The EU seems to be the only governing institute that cares much about data privacy, it's thanks to the GDPR laws that sites have to ask you for cookies. Still, there's a lot more work to be done, and waiting for the law to catch up with big tech developments is a losing game. Lastly, GREED: holy fucking shit these companies will do anything for money. From illegally selling your data for advertisements to spying on your device (you may think I'm talking about TikTok, but it wasn't too long ago that Facebook was caught doing it too) and stealing your content for AI training, you are always the product if you don't have to pay for the for-profit stock market company's services. Look at how fast Elon Musk turned into a fascist grifter to take money from the right wing the moment he realized there was money to be made; he turned Twitter into his personal breeding ground for conspiracies and fascism. Bots are a large problem too, especially with LLMs out and about. They target larger social media sites most of all with their disinformation and spam, while the small-time social media sites get hit with DDOS attacks at most.

The Alternatives

There are smaller social media sites, however. Few are for general purposes, since stuff like ao3 and Webtoon can be considered social media by some but are very specific in their content. Bluesky is probably the most known at this point. It's for-profit but doesn't run ads and is kept afloat by investors (they vowed to not put ads on their website, nor will they sell their website contents for AI training). It's got some really nice functions too like the blocklists and customizable feeds. Many accuse it of being an echo chamber, but the users on Bluesky seem to be more aware of echo chambers than on other social media, which is a good thing. Plus, if it goes to shit, the open-source nature means people can just fuck off with the source code and set up their own thing. Tumblr still exists, as a surprise to many. The online culture there is unique, active & well-preserved and has its own fair share of unique problems too. One such an example is the absolutely staggering amount of GenAI porn bot advertisements, holy fucking shit there's so many. 4chan also exists, though I'm not the biggest fan of it. It's most similar in structure to Reddit, which also means it has the same issue: providing a community to the most insane and violent people out there, alongside actually nice communities. 4chan is for-profit and runs ads. A lot of other sites branched off of 4chan but those tend to attract a lot of the previously mentioned extremists.

Mastodon exists too. As a decentralized service it's been accused of attracting pedophiles and extremists, in part due to the fact it also uses community moderation instead of global moderation. In practice there's not much difference compared to Discord or Reddit when it comes to the aforementioned problems, so it's worth a try. Mastodon's also part of the Fediverse, just like PeerTube and the next candidate: Diaspora. Diaspora's even more decentralized than Mastodon, so that's great for privacy! Still, I know absolutely nothing of it, so I can't give any advice other than saying it's worth a try. Lastly, Discord: if you use it, you probably know why an alternative would be preferred. Stoat (formarly known as Revolt, had to undergo a recent name change due to a legal threat surrounding the brand name) is the only alternative I know. It's based in the EU and is thus a lot more GDPR compliant than Discord could ever be. I personally like it, the desktop version is very customizable in its themes and it's open-source too. Runs on donations. The public communities are very small and inactive most of the time. You can set up this bot really easily to link a Discord server to a Stoat server. The biggest flaw keeping it from increasing adoption is that the mobile app is still a work in progress (alpha/beta version) and lacks a lot of features. Still, I really recommend it if you can convince others to use it as well (I failed).

Of course, my preferred option is Neocities. I've always had a very artistic view on the internet, and allowing users to make their own websites has given them so much more freedom than other social media websites ever did. The act of browsing websites just to browse and learn random things is common again. Despite being the most technical social media platform to use, it feels the most organic out of all of them.