In my heart of hearts I always knew simplicity and mininalism was but a passing trend.

There was definitely an issue with early software having defaults that were not informed by data but by the creator’s opinions, which were often not shared by the majority of people and in some places that still continues (looking at you, KDE).

All this supposedly scientific but hardly reproducible marketing research about decisions and research paralysis yada yada how people hate options and want what everyone else has, tying in absurd bullshit pseudoscience like psychology (especially evolutionary psychology) and so on and making all those crazy assumptions about cultures like that one study about the tribe who couldn’t see blue that constantly gets misframed by clickbait farms like design theory on YT etc etc.

And all of it failed to consider that people live in the world they live in, and their preferences are consequences of existing designs, not what led to those designs.

I welcome a world where the average person can interact with the fediverse and take more ownership over the software they use and how they interact with the net.

I’ve cancelled all monthly subs except Spotify, including netflix and prime, I pirate everything and self-host, I don’t use any social media apart from YT, and I use that only with DeArrow, Sponsorblock and uBlock and I will never be okay with ads. If you don’t want algorithms in your life, you don’t want data harvesting and so on, you don’t need to, it was always that easy.

One thing I do disagree with the author on, I hate capitalism so I hate all those corpos and their shitty bloated super-optimized-for-engagement websites.