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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I don’t know if I’m ready to believe, but I hope decentralization is the next shape of the internet, as it was before.

    For years I’ve watched smaller businesses give up on having websites in favor of just a Facebook page, or businesses built entirely on YouTube, Instagram or Facebook, with the very real risk of having the rug arbitrarily pulled out from under then for some dumb reason. It’s totally unsustainable to rely on the whims of these platforms to house your canonical home or as a base for your income stream.

    Sure it’s nice to reach a wide audience by publishing to platforms with many users, but companies still need to be in control of their identity, so if some platform goes south, it’s not a catastrophe.


  • It’s still early days.

    Reddit has been pretty good at not walling off content, but think of all the forums that died and went to hell, being tortured in the afterlife as a facebook group, where all the knowledge people spend time writing down, all the questions being answered, are trapped in the facebook ecosystem, where it’s close to impossible to find. This is by design too I believe. I used to be a mod on a hardware forum and we had rules that you needed to search before asking. The opponents to this rule said, that if people just searched, then the forum would die out (it didn’t) and I’m quite certain that information on facebook is hidden away, to keep engagement going, by having the same shit being asked and answered over and over in perpetuity.

    I like the idea of going back to forums, but with the added benefits of federation. It’s the best of both worlds in my opinion.



  • I was just thinking the exact same thing. Things seems to have accelerated lately, but I don’t know if this is something regular users even notice or care about and it just feels significant to us because of the recent twitter and reddit idiocy.

    I am super excited about all the attention the fediverse is getting. There are still a ton issues to be solved here, but decentralization feels like the next evolutionary step of the web.

    One of the issues is “who’s gonna pay for it”? And I think the answer is something like “most users are”, in the sense that you’d pay your local instance, the same way you used to pay for newsgroups. Thus keeping it out of the hands of venture capitalists, hedge funds and billionaires in general, because hopefully we’ve learned that that’s a bad thing.