When I was growing up the internet was a place to be liberated from the world say what you want to say, be whoever you want and form genuine communities with shared interests. Now the internet feels like a tool to enslave the mind with identity echo chambers and any deviation leads you to being banned and blocked shunned and silenced within a void that is inescapable. Novel unique websites coded manually by hobbyists running servers for free in the commons allowing people access to the free flow of information under the banner of “information should be free” has largely gone away with corpratisation. I miss the days when the internet was populated largely by nerds aiming to make a better world not this controlled censored hell hole of profiteering.
Nice hyperbole. No, I don’t feel enslaved. Give me a fucking break. Enslaved, really? Be the fucking change you want to see, if you are feeling “enslaved.”
The issue with the corporate internet is that running large websites cost money. The larger the community, the more costs it takes to run. The balance between moderation and a free-for-all is delicate. Fully open allows too much spam and trolling to still remain useful, too much and people start writing in code to bypass censors. You want to go back to seedy chatrooms with a couple dozen regulars, I’m sure you can still find a few places to scratch that itch.
Federation is a great concept, and we’ll see where it goes, but social media splintering from a Twitter/Meta/Reddit stranglehold to a more splintered collection of sites has both advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, when everyone is in one place, you get a lot of idiots. On the other, you have to go to multiple places to find everyone/everything you’re looking for. Seems a lot of people like the ease of one-stop-shopping, so that’s how we got here.