by Mike Shea on 23 June 2025
I read a lot of Cory Doctorow these days and think a lot about the enshittified internet we're living with today. Doctorow rightly blames shitty regulation as a major culprit and hopes to get people fired up to fight against massive corporate greed in tech with better regulation.
But there are things we can do right now to make our own use of the internet better. Some of these are easy. Some are hard. Some cost money. But they can be done and, when we do so, we can get back to the internet we used to love.
Here's a hard truth. The world doesn't owe you a great internet. It isn't easy and It isn't free. If you can't be bothered to do this stuff, that's on you. If you worry that the average person won't do this stuff – you and I don't have to be average. That's on them.
Here's a list from least difficult to most difficult ways I've taken back control over the internet.
Ublock Origin. Even the FBI tells you to protect yourself from malware by using an ad blocker. Ironically, if everyone followed the FBI's advice, trillion dollar corporations would go out of business (boohoo), but whatever. Ublock Origin is a free and beloved ad blocker. Google Chrome recently inhibited some of its functionality because, you know, they're the problem, so you'll need to use Firefox for the full Ublock Origin but even Ublock Origin Lite on Chrome is better than nothing. But yeah, you should also probably leave Chrome and go to Firefox.
DuckDuckGo. There's no reason to keep using Google. Unrestrained and with something like a 93% dominance in the market, it's the golden child of enshittification. Duckduckgo is a good free alternative that doesn't track you and isn't working to ensure you never actually find the results you're looking for. Also, no baked-in AI slop. But even better is...
Kagi. I love Kagi. Kagi is a paid search engine with a decent free tier. You are their actual customer – not advertisers. You can customize it. You can decide which sites you should rank higher and which lower. Do you want to avoid constant links to YouTube and Reddit? Turn them off. Kagi is a power-users dream search engine. I love it and it's totally worth the money. Again, the world doesn't owe you a free search engine.
Podcasts. Podcasts are pretty mainstream but they're also not enshittified, which is great. That's as long as you're using a real podcast app like Overcast and avoid being fed podcasts by Spottify and YouTube who work every second to take value from creators and listeners and give it to billionaires. Use a real podcast app that doesn't feed you algorithmic results or insert its own ads. Find out about great podcasts from real people.
Email Newsletters. Email is the social media platform of the future. Email newsletters are a great way to connect with actual writers and not be spoon-fed whatever techno-megacorp wants to feed you. Sign up for newsletters and build a direct relationship with the writers you love. I run my own RPG-focused newsletter you should join if you're into tabletop RPGs.
Forums. Remember forums? They're still out there. I like to hang out on EN World for RPG-related stuff but there are other hosted forums that aren't part of Facebook or whatever. They're hosted by real people for real communities and they can be awesome.
Blogs and RSS Readers. Back before Facebook destroyed the news, we had blogs and RSS feeds – a technology to syndicate articles and draw them into your own news reader. Google Reader made it popular but Google killed it because of, let's say it together, enshittification! It can take work to find your favorite sources of news and commentary and add them to your RSS reader but it's worth it. An RSS-backed news reader is a digital newspaper of the sources you love without any algorithm between you and the news you want to see. It also strips away all the crap a lot of websites load up on nowadays. There are several good RSS readers. Feedly isn't bad but it's getting a bit tech-bro with all the crypto and AI talk. I really love NetNewsWire on my iphone.
Mastodon. Mastodon is a truly federated microblogging platform (think like Twitter before...you know...). There are some native Mastodon clients but I really love Ivory on my iPhone. Because Mastodon is a federated service, you'll have to choose a server. You can go with a big one like mastodon.social or one focused on whatever community you want to be a part of. I'm on chirp.enworld.org for RPG stuff but dice.camp is the more popular choice for TTRPG community stuff.
Lemmy. What if Reddit were federated? That's Lemmy. it's tiny compared to Reddit but there are a lot of cool communities there writing about lots of different things and no pile of dude-bros at the top hoping to become billionaires by selling your stuff to AI companies. Like Mastodon, you have to pick a particular Lemmy server to join. I like ttrpg.network but lemmy.world is more general purpose.
A Home Raspberry Pi Server. Ok, yeah, this takes more work. Raspberry Pis are tiny linux computers about the size of a deck of playing cards. You can install all sorts of things on them from like photos, music, movies, games, virtual tabletops, your own web server, whatever. A Raspberry Pi with Docker installed on it lets you host all sorts of applications without anyone getting between you and your digital stuff. I have two of them going right now – one for my general purpose server and one for my...
Pihole. What if you could block ads before they even touched your network? That's what a pi-hole does. It blocks ads for every device in your house at the source. It can take some trickery to ensure you don't accidentally bork up your home domain name connections but once its up, it's very solid and very well loved by those who use it.
Jellyfin. What if you had your own home music streaming service? Jellyfin is opensource software to let you manage a local music library and stream it to whatever device you want to stream it too. It can take some fiddling to get that streaming working with any given device but when it does, you have all your own music playing to your own devices without needing a streaming service. For sources of music, I really love Bandcamp.
What about reading books? That's hard to enshittify as long as you're not buying them on Amazon. Bookshop.org lets you buy books and donate money to your local bookstore when doing so. Ebooks.com lets you buy ebooks without DRM so you can use it on different platforms and different providers. Libro.FM lets you buy and download audiobooks without DRM as well.
I have a handful of truly enshittified services I still use. Discord is a big one. It's still a great service but they're clearly trying to "go 10x" on it by throwing in more ads or doing gods-know-what with our data. There's no good alternative that I've found that handles the same scale of Discord, though.
I haven't moved to another chat service. I'm still using texts and iMessage on my iphone. I'd avoid anything tied to Facebook though, or really, anything centralized.
YouTube. There's nothing out there even remotely like YouTube. Peertube hopes to but it's so tiny and so expensive to run that it just doesn't count. YouTube is so massive it's like a whole single video-based internet owned by Google. I don't spend a ton of time on YouTube but it's a big part of my RPG business. I wish that weren't the case but here we are.
The old internet we loved is still there. It didn't go away. It takes effort, and maybe some money, to get back to the internet we loved before it became five giant algorithmic websites sharing screenshots of the other four. But we can get there. Some things are easy (default to another search engine than Google and install an ad-blocker). Some are hard (I get it, everyone you love is on Facebook). All of it is worth thinking about.