Very interesting, I have long been familiar with Dunbar's Number, but I'd actually not thought about it connection with things like social media influencers/streamers. (Probably because that's not my scene, I don't stream/don't watch streams.)

That sounds about correct though, I actually can't even imagine trying to regularly communicate with that many people directly, in a chatroom style format. It sounds oppressive and demanding.

and just uninstall apps that control you and make you mentally unstable.

While this is good, at this point, the "apps" that "control you" are fully the operating system itself. Android and Windows now both especially push advertising in gross ways and spend way too much time sending way too much data back to home base. iOS and macOS are like maybe just slightly better in that regard, but not a whole lot.

Which leaves you with Linux for computing and android alternatives like LineageOS or GrapheneOS, all of which demand a little bit more technical knowhow on the individuals part.

It's so so much harder to escape than it used to be. It's pretty pervasive at this point and damaging to the average person, in terms of how "apps that control you" can really be the whole computer or phone.

[–] vexikron@lemmy.zip 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I completely agree regarding mobile OS's.

I am currently writing this on an Android phone that is basically as de googled as i can get it via installing f droid, then the aurora store and neo store to replace everything I can with open source stuff, remove as many permissions for everything as possible such that it still functions, etc.

Problem is my computer was trashed, and I cannot risk accidentally bricking this phone right now, so no safe way to root this thing, using only itself, in a way that is 100% guaranteed exists, at least as far as I am aware.

Anyway... good luck explaining any of this to non tech savvy or non tech nerds. Quite literally the vast majority of them have already had their brains rotted via aforementioned social apps...

Basically we more or less live in a kind of cyberpunk dystopian zombie apocalypse: nearly all social media apps are equivalent to hard drugs that cause dependency, ruin attention spans, and generally drive nearly all users into echo chambers that cause extremism of some kind or another, steal much of your attention, alienate you from real world interactions, and as you mention are functionally both mass spying devices for governments, and for corporations to perfect market research and become even more effective at selling what is nearly always overpriced garbage, or laughably mundane and unoriginal 'content' of some kind.

Try explaining this to people, and that the only way to avoid it, not even to fight this but just to avoid this is to... learn things and give up their digital drugs?

In my experience they nearly always respond with emotional violence, social ostracization, and sometimes even physical violence.