I can see how some people can get trapped in a bubble of Google and FB. I hope they can realize that Google, FB, Reddit, and Twitter are not "the internet".

I stopped using FB when the timeline became useless (it was hard to filter to a specific friend or family member), and also that I no longer wanted to see updates from people I didn't even want to hear from. I have since switched to smaller and more personally curated social media platforms like a group chat or a discord server.

Sure google is a common homepage for a lot of people, but there are other alternatives that work well. TBH, a few years ago, I wanted to switch to DuckDuckGo, but their search results were lacking compared to google, but fast forward to now, DDG gives more accurate and useful results than Google's ad driven and AI driven "search results".

I've enjoyed my "internet experience" much better after switching from Reddit to Lemmy. Just the fact that it's not driven by profit, and policy changes are not a the whim of a monolithic corporation, makes the experience much better. I generally don't see people trying to grift on lemmy. I really appreciate the useful and well thought out comments/posts on lemmy compared to other platforms.

Also, Mastodon is so much more enjoyable to use than Twitter (deadnaming it, I don't care).