Introduction

Lately I realized that I am everyday growing tired about the slow but unstoppable enshittyfication of mainstream services and applications on Android (and a bit on iOS) driven by the huge push of AI capabilities on every corner of the OS and system applications. This is not a problem that affects tech, but almost everything around us. Things tend to cost more, while the quality of materials and assebly is lower; every stupid IoT object requires a bloatware app to be installed and an account to be created; it is impossible to own any piece of software anymore and every media platform is full of ads. The cherry on top is represented by AI: companies are trying to add AI capabilities to every piece of software, via useless features that nobody asked for and that add little to no value.

This aggressive push of a technology that is there only to feed and create a revenue stream that is not sostenible pollutes and destroy the natural ecosystem and the virtual ecosystem of products that in the last decade helped people to be connected and feel close.

The only possible way ahead I see to counteract, or at least, survive the ongoing enshittification is to use it as an opportunity to learn and use the technology that matters, and to identify the outliers brands and products. This does not ensure a improvement of the mainstream products but helps creating strong competitors, giving them the chance to influence the market.

I am fully aware that choosing a less known product can ufortunately be seen as a bad choiche from the perspective of a consumer; particularly in the IT field, where a less famous app, or mobile OS in this case, at a first glance cames with many downsides.

Why SailfishOS

I have pre-ordered a Jolla Phone 2 when it was announced last year, and I've secured a shipment in the first batch. I don't want to justify this purchase as a mere technical curiosity, philosophical choiche in following a community driven product, or as a moral ground against US monopolies.

My choice was guided by the idea of the platform to be offering only the basics feature to make the device usable as a daily driver, but not to be bloated by features, applications and telemetry that nobody asked.

I had the luck and opportunity to use a Jolla Community Phone 2 for a week (thanks to a friend), and I used that time trying to put myself in the ropes of a normal user that just wants their phone to work. At first glance a SailfishOS device may not look appaeling to them because of:

In my opinion not all of the point above are an issue per-se but may discourage new users to adopt this platfom.

Built-in features

By default the built-in features are complete enough to have a daily device that works, but some improvements are needed; mostly camera and connectivity. Achieving a computational photography software capable of delivering results comparable to mid-high range Android devices would be difficult, but small improvements like faster camera loading time, exposure control and support for multiple camera modules could improve greatly the user experience.

On the connectivity side, the main risk I identify is the built-in browser running a very old version of ESR, that renders the navigation experience frustrating. I don't know how much of the navigation performances were affected by the poor HW of the C2; but different website were not loading at all on.

In my opinion these downsides, while true, should not be feared. Of course major companies are not going to invest for developing on a platform with little market share, all those money are going to be spent in AI tokens! The same applies for the OS features, it cannot compete with a an operating system that is backed by a billion dollars company and has years of development and improvements pushed by different vendors.

Application support

The application ecosystem of SailfishOS appears to be fragmented, sporadic and characterised by slow development and carefully crafted development. Unfortunately the core applications are also affected by the fact that newer versions of Qt cannot be used because of licensing issues. Luckily the great community put some effort to package Qt6.

Together with the great amount of applications developed by the community, the overall support is great; however I am hoping for Jolla to get help from the EU or Finland, allowing the company to switch to a newer version of Qt, incetivize development and support for the platform with events - and start collaboration with other companies to provide a good set of built-in applications, all of this while the community supports itself by providing a central donation page.

It also fundamental to note the great support of Android application via the proprietary application layer, allowing SailfishOS devices to be used as daily drivers for many people.

I will for sure update my journey with SailfishOS and the new Jolla Phone when it arrives. In the meanwhile if you would like to learn more about this community-made, EU based mobile OS check out the official forum and the super interesting blog post wrote by Ruben De Smet.

Listening to music ~ again

I was an early user of Spotify, and since 7 years I have a Family plan that I share with my family and friends. I have used Spotify happily, and the idea to be able to listen to new albums, have access to an unlimited collection of songs, and ease of use on different devices, was always a great selling point to me, justifying the price of the subsription and of the vendor lock-in. But... in the last year and half the bump up in price, and the stupid AI features announcements, smart shuffle that propose always the same (sponsored) songs, and ads appearing in the paid subscription made me think on going back to my own digital copies of songs.

My mother has always been a disc collector, and during weekends in our house a nice disc was always playing in the backgroud, dictating the time between breakfast and lunch, when the lyrics Mina's songs where sobstituted by the monotone voice of a news anchor.

This to say that music CDs and records are part of my parent's house since I can remember, and such collection can be easily digitalised, so that I can finally own my own music. And I know... the space to store physical CDs and records is never enough, but there a digital stores such as Bandcampo, and Iomoio that are great to buy music at a fair price and DRM free.

The process took some time, and it is far from being completed, but at the end many gigabytes of music are stored on my nextcloud instance, and can be streamed, or downloaded on any device when needed.

Reading books ~ again

Well, I like to read. EVERYTHING. The point is, my apartment is small, not that much space for hoarding a bunch of books. Also I like to read while I am travelling, so some years ago I bought a Kindle, the Kindle scribe 1st generation to be precise, and I then started to buy books via Amazon; and then it hit me. I am not buying the book, I am buying a license to own the book, so mr. Bezos can kindly revoke it at any time for any reason, so I am just downloading the books in my Calibre library until I find an ebook store that sells DRM free books.

In addition to the kindle I decided to invest 50€ for a XTEINK X3, a small, compact e-ink reader, that was very hyped in social media. I ABSOLUTELY OVERUSED IT. This summer I used it daily for an average of 4 hours a day. Some of the titles I read this summer include the whole Dan Simmon's Hyperion serie, and Old Man's War serie by John Scalzi. One of the main reasons why I like the X3 so much is the fact that is a compact little device, that I bring with me everyday, with the possibility to flash an open source firmware like CrossReader that doesn't call home, and syncs easily with my Calibre library.

Social media ~ again

The only person I know that is not on any social media is Gianni Menichetti; but he is a unique human being that lives in corner of heaven where impure things like social media are not allowed.

I had a facebook account, then I deleted in in 2018, not because I didn't like it, but because it was the social where all the "Buongiornissimo" and boomers were. Instagram was my Social Media platform of choice; I used it to follow what was happening in my friends life watching their stories, laughing at memes, and following some interesting IT Security profiles. Then I realized. I realized how poisonous the algorithm was, made to feed me not what I wanted to see, but what it deemed appropriate for me - spoiler - every piece of media fed to me was either polarizing, rage bait, or straight propaganda.

A lot of profiles I was following were permanently shadow banned, in such a way that I forgot I was following them, while me reels feed was full of things that I never ever looked at.

I would also not go trough all the really disgusting things that Meta and its CEO are up to lately in this post. So I just decided to quit Instagram and be part of ~TikTok~ (Joking!) the fediverse!

I had in the past an account on infosec.exchange; but I decided to move it on mastodon.uno the biggest Italian instance, just because I wanted to support some great made in Italy initiative, while still following all the interesting infosec profiles. If you feel tired of your social media feed, maybe you should go back to a social network with no algorithm, date based timelines and with the content you decide to see.

Sure, a model where there is no advertisement will lack all the influencers™ and cool AI™ features - maybe for the better.

In conclusion

This was a summary of a journey I started (and not yet concluded) in finding passion again in using tech I love, instead of being used by it to feed data. Surely I will post again about this topic, feel free to follow me on Mastodon for little (un)frequent updates.

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