Technology

If we are going to wait for the right legislation, then we are probably going to wait a very long time.

You're not on Facebook and Twitter? Good. It's entry-level stance, but nonetheless a good one, particularly if you are under 40 years of age.

YouTube is more difficult as it is, for me at least, mostly a replacement for television, videotape, and DVDs. My search for alternatives haven't been too fruitful, but I often go to Vimeo, Archives, niconoco (they're back in service starting early August), occasionally RuTube and vk (I support Ukraine in the war, but I'm not going to hate Russia), for a while the Chinese sites (though there seems to be less selection these days, too many ads, and some of it is YouTube embeds), Jamendo, and WikiCommons, and yes PeerTube (I suppose searching in time will get easier). (I'm also thinking of going back to P2P a bit.)

FWIW, I have this https://lemmy.world/c/musicnoytnosnofbnoff on Lemmy, and so far I might be the only contributor. The one I have on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/musicNoYTNoSNoFBNoFF/ I can no longer access as the account I used to create it has been suspended (and yes, suspended for no good reason). I could be the sole contributor for the next few years and I won't give up.

Yes, many Americans, many people, are stuck in shitty jobs that take too much of their time, and a lot of it is nonessential. However, over a trillion hours (e.g. say over 250 million people x over 4000 hours in less than 10 years) have been spent on FB, Twitter, and YouTube. If 1% of that time was spent on alternatives, choices could improve dramatically. But they might not, it might be that they probably won't, at least not for most of the Fox and CNN viewership. No matter: the search for alternatives continue and if people like us remain a small minority for years, maybe decades, to come, then we will nonetheless continue. We will be our own 1%ers.