I personally feel these are the end days of what’s left of the freedom internet.
I hope you're wrong. I guess that should go without saying. But I don't know, it seems like they've been trying to crack down and been consistently failing at it, which is hopeful. Like youtube's attempt to make adblockers not work anymore ending up just strengthening uBlock Origin and making it work even better than it did before. lol.
Obviously, google et al have all the power, but even so, they mostly keep losing battles, which is both hilarious and hopeful. I agree that we're seeing the further enshitification of all the big social media giants and they're corralling and enclosing the commons more all the time. But I haven't given up on all the little things that spring up to address that enshitification, like the frontends, like searx, and hell, even lemmy. You were 100% right, we need to evolve, but I would say these things are good mutations that are part of the process of that necessary evolution.
I don't know, I'm too high rn not to go off on tangents.
Making this comment because I'm seeing some of these issues crop up in the comments, and in comments from different instances that can't see each other, so rather than reply individually, I'll just make a separate standalone comment.
It bugs me a little whenever people talk about how old a species is. There are different levels to how wrong it is possible to be about this. The worst level is where people think that it's the individuals that are somehow ancient. No. The individuals from those times are as long gone as all the other individuals from that time. Most people don't think that, but it happens. Another level is a bit less wrong, but still is. That the species itself is ancient because it somehow avoided evolution. Nah, it's just retained a lot of characteristics. Theses species still underwent evolution, it's literally unavoidable. It's just that the way they adapted to an ancient environment still works as adaptation to the current (and intervening) environments. They haven't gone through as many drastic visible changes because the way their ancestors lived still works for their modern iterations.
So it is definitely fair to say a species is old, but it's important to realize that that doesn't mean it's literally old in that it hasn't evolved. If they are impressed by species that haven't gone through a lot of apparent changes over the eons, they should check out stromatolites.