What is to be done about free software?

I was thinking recently about the long arc of the linux desktop experience recently - its growth from random hobbyists, its rise in the server space and the influx of technology that came with it. In the oughts we had the development of open office (forked into libre office now, thankfully) and the utter dominance of the gnome 2 design paradigm. This was the time where you saw dirt-cheap ubuntu disks in retail stores and had the ability to get them in free mailers. The idea that someone was giving this stuff out for free (both as in speech and as in beer) was quite mindblowing at the time.

Eventually the hype died down and things changed. 'Software as a service', the rise of google, data harvesting and the maturation of web 2 put free software in a very weird position. Free-as-in-speech software won the server market, but the software they served to users was very much un-free, zero dollars but not even free-as-in-beer: users payed with their data. We also had the rise of the mobile and the embedded markets: free-as-in-speech-software has become a dominating force there as well, but the platforms themselves are anything but free for the user.

All of this has put the linux desktop/hobbyist community, as much as there a single community, in a very weird place. Competing with windows is not $0 vs $200 anymore, it's $0 vs $0. Users pay with their data and by being trapped into service ecosystems - which is arguably an extremely unethical version of how linux workstations were and are monetized. It's a much harder selling point nowdays - it's not mindblowing that someone is giving away a functional OS for free(-as-in-beer): it's the norm! In the past people unironically abbrievated "Microsoft" as "M$". Nowdays this is just funny, microsoft contributes to the kernel and a ton of linux users regularly use microsoft services! The linux desktop is more user friendly than it's ever been thanks to a lot of hard work from wonderful, passionate, people - but convincing users that they should care about ideological freedom is difficult.

There is also a bigger problem here - what does it even mean to run linux nowdays? To what extent is the platform free? You might call this the "bootloader for chromium" problem. In addition, the tools used to fight against the challenges posed by web apps and embedded devices, AGPL and GPLv3, have been rejected by a lot of the linux community - either for pragmatic or for ideological reasons. We're left in a state that even a dedicated linux user is going to be on the receiving end of all of these proprietary software and services, monetized in the same way an average windows user is. Often times this isn't even their choice, but a pre-requisite of being part of the modern world: Of working, of communicating, and of having job prospects in general. (Not everyone can afford to be rms viewing the web through emailed html pages with icecat).

I can use matrix all I want and evangelize it, but the world has gone with discord and slack and I can't afford not to be on those platforms. I can evangelize and use signal, but I'm never going to convince the millions of people to move out of whatsapp. It's a dire situation, made even more dire by projects like chromium which are "free" but so complex and controlled that they may as well not be. Meanwhile, companies like redhat and canonical are much more interested in serving the embedded space and the military more than they are anything else.

I apologize for the rant, but I think it's important to talk about. So, I ask the question here, what is to be done? Is it enough nowdays just to contribute to FOSS projects we like? I feel like the problem has become too big, poking away at our hobbyhorses won't help anymore. I want to make the argument that it's explicit political action that's needed, but that's even more dire. Have these thoughts crossed anybody else's minds? How do you still do work on these projects without these thoughts constantly buzzing over your head, poking at you? It's dramatically affected my output, certainly.