Truscape
Fox scout TF2?
“Do you have video games?”
While I’m not defending our current situation for news, there is a reason conditions are the way they are. The general unprofitability of running a news network in the modern day, especially when both print and online advertising rates are rock bottom, forces all but the biggest players out.
Social media, 24/7 cable news, and forum websites are many peoples’ main sources of news, often due to their entry price of 0. As a result, the death of well funded independent journalism was inevitable, and we’re all suffering the consequences of that. Especially those who don’t know how or don’t care to verify their sources.
At this point I tend to have better luck running a Wikipedia search on the latest events and checking the citations section than checking any major website/app’s feed, especially with most media feeds being curated nowadays. Unless open platforms gain wider adoption, where people all over the world collaborate to find answers to the world’s problems, I doubt things will improve.
I think it’s fair to say that one of the biggest reasons we are able to have the computing freedom that we have is because of OSS, and the competition it brings to proprietary software. It also allows for a varying expressions of ideas rather than centralized control.
The ability to have tools that can be audited by any human is the greatest tool against enshittification. By far.
I think it’s the same phenomenon in multi-player gaming - community hosted servers tend to have less garbage flying around compared to centrally hosted company servers.
If you run your own server, you’re far more likely to care about the user experience. And if you run your own server, you make your own rules and can manage how you’d like - no obligations.
