We all know the struggle of beloved services slowly going downhill. What’s one service, tool, or website you’ve been using for years that’s still great and hasn’t turned to crap?
Steam
This! Steam is the only proprietary program I use on my Linux machines that I’m actually happy with and don’t want to get rid of
Local library
Wikipedia.
Though I could do without the endless donation blockups.
I can forgive Wikipedia and Internet Archive for the spam. Both sites are incredibly valuable and completely ad-free.
Linux
It just keeps getting better and more polished.
I think Linux enshitifcation will happen when Linus Torvalds is no longer the benevolent dictator. I assume bigtech would add more DRM crap for more usecases etc, regular (unintentional) userspace breaking for desktop users since development would be focused for server/cloud computing etc.
We need to protect Linus at all costs.
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Actual paid services? Basically only Steam.
FOSS is the only software you can count on to not start nickel and diming you once the subscriber count starts to level out.
Steam
30% markup. Predatory currency conversion policies. Recent scandals with Steam censoring games on behest of Australian Right nuts groups.
Rss.
It’s cool yeah. But not unenshittified. Many sites enshittify their own RSS feeds, demanding workarounds like caching, reformatting, or scraping, using tools like RSSHub.
But the problem is the lack of good, simple RSS readers on mobile. I miss Pulse.
Honestly it’s better to use an RSS server and then manage the feeds in one single RSS feed so you don’t have to shuffle around any kind of local readers. That will make most of them a lot more bearable since their biggest issue is organization. For editing lists of RSS feeds I recommend RSSGuard as it has the best filesystem-like management. Otherwise just use regular expressions on the OPML file
Sockethub (RSS/XMPP/IRC bridge) for Conversations/Cheogram or the Delta/Arcane Chat bots are my personal choice because chronologically bumping the feeds makes sense to me, muting/archiving/custom notifications is easy to manage, as is inviting collaborators.
I actually have invented something better than Google Reader (including the social aspect) but it’s kind of a secret rn 🤫
This sounds awesome! If what you’re talking about is a new software you’re working on, hit me up! I have time to spare for some coding and have literally considered writing a better feed reader for myself or finding an OSS project to contribute to
It’s pretty slapdash and unprofessional using a variety of other people’s projects but I will make a guide for easy, reliable assembly of a federated google reader equivalent when I am satisfied with my shitty fork. The whole misskey fork community is a travesty tho bc misskey has some ǫᴜᴇsᴛɪᴏɴᴀʙʟᴇ design choices. Will keep ya ppsted
