Stop complaining about enshittification. Use the alternatives

Frequently I read and hear comments from people complaining about the so called enshittification¹ effect we have to endure every day in our digital lives. Most of the time what I read between the lines is passive reluctant acceptance, that bad experience with digital services has become an inevitable part of our lives and there’s nothing we can do about it, like herpes and taxes.

Let me start with staying I don’t believe is possible to get rid of all of the enshittification out there, especially given the pace at which companies are now slapping an AI label on top of everything possible and imaginable, no matters what the users actually want nor need.

In this article I try to make the case it’s actually not as doomy and gloomy as many seem to picture, how simply changing a few habits can have a sensible positive shift and how the experience with modern technologies today can actually be quite a pleasant one overall.

I’ll list a few popular and allegedly shitty services and habits I’ve personally replaced (and a few that I haven’t yet) to make my digital life a better one and, as usual, will look forward to hear your thoughts and solutions too.²

First of all: move away from Alphabet services#

Google is arguably THE ads business and the ads business is as shitty as it gets. It doesn’t have to be done in one day and I’m not advocating to boycott every single Alphabet product, just to get rid of the most annoying ones. You know, step by step, like Rome was built.

Drop Google Search#

As of today there are plenty of alternatives, none of which is perfect³, all of them I personally find way better than Google Search.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as default search engine since… I can’t say for sure but I’d bet that more than 10 years have gone already. I remember in the beginning I was still falling back on Google Search once in a while because results weren’t that satisfying or comprehensive; that’s changed long ago and I actually never reach for Google Search anymore.

I also got used the little nice touches of DDG search webapp where e.g. I can use my keyboard to navigate between results, or the badges it provides for simple searches like “what’s my IP address” or “convert me X inches into meters” and so on.

I won’t say much about sycophantic Google Search AI responses which I read about here and there. To me DDG just works: results are relevant, ads are not intrusive nor camouflaged, it can be easily set as default for all the browsers I know of⁴ and has more respect of your privacy than Google ever had and ever will⁵. Now that I think about it I can’t honestly list a single reason why I’m supposed to use Google Search today.

If you are not served well enough by DDG there are a few other alternatives which I haven’t tried, like Brave or Ecosia.

PS For my agents’ search needs I use both Brave and Tavily⁶ APIs, for my usage I never need more than what their free tier gives me.

Drop GMail#

I’m curious to know what kind of a poor ads-infested experience is GMail today, I bet it’s bad, isn’t it?

Similarly to how Search is overrated and obsolete, the same for me has been long true for GMail. I’ve been an early GMail adopter back in the days when it truly was a transformative service⁷ but that time is long gone, there are now so many better freemium alternatives out there.

Personally I’ve been customer of ProtonMail for years and even just the fact that for free you get no ads and a nicer address out of the box (<account>@pm.me) would be worth the migration, but that doesn’t end there, of course. See what Proton has to offer or other independent takes like this to get a more comprehensive list for reasons to switch; once you’re a Proton user you also get other nice perks for free like a VPN, a Zoom-like application called Proton Meet, and many others. They make you an offer really hard to refuse.

Proton still not good enough for you? Perhaps try out one of the other alternatives.

Drop Chrome#

It’s a mystery to me how many rant every day about Google’s invasive presence in their lives and at the same time are willingly installing its most powerful spying tool. It’s not even the default on most operating systems and still it managed to become the market leader by far, applying its lobbying power towards a less private internet. That’s never going to change a bit unless we change our habits.

I’m a Mac user since long. Perhaps Safari is a good product after all? I honestly don’t know, I’ve been a Firefox happy user more or less since I got started with computers (before of FF was… Netscape?!) and stuck with it and generally shrug when I read bad comments about Mozilla.

No, it’s not perfect. No, it doesn’t have yet a sustainable business model. Yes, it does protect your privacy better than the alternatives, and definitely better than Google does. Yes, you can tweak it as much as you want. Yes, you can get rid of most if not all website’s ads. Yes, its developer tools are good.

Do you really hate Firefox for reasons I’ll never understand? Again, perhaps you can have a look at one of the few alternatives so you can finally get rid of that piece of spyware you’ve been using so far.

Drop Windows#

A few days ago a friend of mine asked me for some help with his Windows laptop that got too slow to use in any meaningful professional way. Sounds familiar?

I’m not surprised to realise that things didn’t change much for poor Win users and a once-in-a-while OS reinstall is still the only viable option. I’m not saying we should all move to NixOS, just… not to use Windows? 😅

A few rules of thumb:

• Are you a gamer? => SteamOS
• Are you a professional? => MacOS
• Are you a power user / developer? => Linux

I’m talking about our personal computers here, I’m not advocating for getting into arguments with employers to change this or that technology, albeit we can still try to educate them on why one tech might be a better choice, how it serves us better while at work, and so on.

Social media tweaks#

I hear you: it’s not that easy to quit that kind of addiction, the network effect is such a drag, and so on.

For how I see it, that’s actually ok. You now the saying, “nothing worth in life is easy”? Well, like it or not, every time we download an app or create an account online, free of charge or not, we’re more or less consciously buying in.

We can also undo it. If the outcome is a life with less noise and more signal in it, it might be well worth it.

Drop Whatsapp#

A few weeks ago Meta thought that my Whatsapp account was somehow violating terms and decided to ban it⁸. That’s been the final nail in the coffin for me and I’m now using Signal exclusively as instant message / video-call application⁹.

The only trouble has been convincing some contacts to move away from WA and other instant messaging platforms because of the usual network effect, but there are just so many reasons to choose Signal that it’s been so far worth the price, e.g:

• works perfectly even for video-calls with continents and oceans in between
• end-to-end encrypted by default
• developed and operated by a no profit
• its protocol is opensource
• your (meta)data isn’t sold to advertisers

My recommendation is to try explain to contacts you care about why this is a good thing to do, that it’s safe, it doesn’t cost anything, and that they might also be better served after all.

And I’ll die on this hill too: for most communication needs, async is better and email is still king.

Drop X (ex Twitter)#

After Musk’s acquisition Twitter has gradually become such an unfixable mess that essentially to my eyes any kind of use of it today is indefensible. The signal/noise ratio is abysmally low, unless you’re looking for an infinite stream of rage baits, in that case it’s still a pretty good service, I guess?

Be honest… deep down your heart you know it’s wrong to still linger in that dirt but you still keep up with it because of the various FOMOs they gradually dragged you into, e.g. that your followers will just forget about your existence if you move away.

First of all, did you even measure the actual benefits of keeping an account there as a content maker? or is it just based on gut feeling and what others say? For example Cal Newport¹⁰ made the case many times that the importance of “being there” is actually way overblown. I buy that argument fully but, even if it wasn’t the case, I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with X/Twitter even if the price to pay would be some loss of users, that might not be the pool of users (bots) I’m interested in in the first place.

Regardless of your microblogging app of choice, you might also want to think about the pros and cons of investing heavily in a single 3rd-party closed platform for connecting with your audience. Keep in mind you’re always one (perhaps inexplicable and unmotivated) account ban away from it, like it or not.

Use feed readers instead of microblog apps#

This is probably my favorite piece of advice: don’t use microblogging platforms as content “feed readers”, since long RSS/Atom feeds are the best way to be kept up to date with projects, personal blogs and news outlets you care the most. There are plenty of good actual feed readers out there¹¹ to choose from. Subscribing to newsletters when available can represent a good option too.

Microblogging platforms allegedly work best when engaging with people and communities; having different apps for different purposes also helps me to stay focused on the activity I’m actually wishing for when reaching for that specific application, instead of finding myself scrolling through mixed content which I’m at best only partially interested in at that specific moment.

More in general I find the IndieWeb movement to be at the same time the oldest trick in the book and the most refreshing one today, I follow the POSSE recommendation strictly¹² and if you’re not yet into it you might be surprised by how active the independent web is. Very high signal/noise ratio!

Other examples#

The list of good (enough) alternatives is long, I’ll list briefly a few others I can think of:

• Drop Android for GrapheneOS
• Drop GitHub for Codeberg/SourceHut/Tangled
• Drop Claude Code/Codex, use Pi or other Open Source harnesses
• …

and so on. Remember the premise: I don’t have the pretension to know them all, nor to say conclusively which are the best ones, nor to believe there are one size fits all solutions. I just want to convince you to try and put the effort in finding out what works best for you instead of just whining about (digital) life being too hard.

Not a boycott for the sake of it#

I know how it might sound like but trust me here, I’m not that idealistic, if something works I use it and even pay for the premium, as I do for, hear hear, Google’s YouTube!¹³.

The most important reason I’m making this case is that I truly believe it’s worth going through the effort because the outcome is living a leaner, cleaner, more satisfying, less distracting, less enraging, and hopefully less surveilled digital life.

No single example for alternative I made so far is perfect, nothing is. If you’re happy with what you are currently using is fine by me, I’m not talking to you and I respect your choice.

I’m talking to you when you tell me “damn I hate my computer is so slow” or “jesus, search result quality has really degraded massively” and “there are so many toxic comments” and “I’m fed up by all these ads” and so on. Don’t stop at the whining, do an extra step, reach for and try out an alternative for a while and see if it sticks.

I hear you, I might sound quite hypocrite telling you in the same article to avoid Google services and admitting to pay for one. I hate banks and I still use credit card payments all the time. I can make many other such examples. Modern life is complicated, I get it.

I seldom come up with perfect solution. For all I know perfect tends to be very rare in a complex world, but not everything has the same value, there are better and worse options, I’m just trying to present the ones which work for me without any pretensions of being universally good for everyone else.

TL;DR: stop whining, find alternatives, don’t be afraid to advocate for them too if you believe they are worth the potential friction.