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If Start menu ads in Windows 11 aren't bad enough, something worse might be on the horizon
(www.xda-developers.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I miss the xda of old, where shitty clickbait articles and ads didn't rule the front page.
It's really upsetting seeing the internet transform into this commercialized capitalistic thing that used to be fun.
Now I want to continue this by saying there are still communities and places that have kept true to the free and open internet and not all of it has been commercialized. And there are always fun and exciting projects happening, recently I've been looking at i2p, it's similar to Tor but designed to be self contained and not for browsing the open web instead something called eepsites similar to onion sites.
ActivityPub gives me hope for the future of the Internet. I was able to completely replace Reddit with Lemmy after the exodus last year. I never used Twitter, but Mastodon seems like an alternative that's gaining popularity.
The one that seems the hardest to replace is YouTube, since hosting and serving video is very expensive, and many creators have come to rely on monitization.
I'm not sure about I2P being an alternative to the clearnet. It helps prevent censorship, sure, but I don't see how it provides anything that you can't do on the clearnet already, other than anonymity. It's also much harder to set up than Tor for non-tech savvy people. Anyone can already host any website they want on the clearnet.
ActivityPub really does feel like the future, or at least the one I hope for, it's been very refreshing and exciting and it gives me much the same feeling as the internet did when I was new.
Video does require a lot of storage unfortunately, and of course it makes sense that creators want money for what they often do. The closest would be that each creator or group setup their own PeerTube, however that comes with cost and administrating, which is not something most would want to do.
I2P is definitely more complex. Unless I2P gets implemented on consumer routers I don't see it becoming really popular, and most things on the internet do not need truly need anonymity even with VPN companies that like to advertise otherwise.