Over the course of 2023, I became totally radicalized by the fediverse's potential to improve just about everything about our online lives. I wrote about why — and what it'll take to get there: https://www.theverge.com/23990974/social-media-2023-fediverse-mastodon-threads-activitypub
@davidpierce The sad thing is that we have had this several times in the past. In the early days there was telnet and BBS. That gave way to usenet news, IRC, and of course the early WWW, which had a wonderful DIY low-fi ethic. Then there was RSS syndication, which provided a way to aggregation diverse content. There was a boom of DIY blogs.
That being said, I hope you are right and we move back to a more decentralized world!
@davidpierce I just love that when something new coming out, someone’s take is always “we can also monetize it”, and how you talk about decentralization and user owned content then immediately talk about creating filtering algorithms on this platform. “Hey look these people didn’t even realized that we can make money from it! ”
I used to believe that adversarial interoperability will save the world from the greed of commercial social media companies. Now I'm convinced it's the fediverse that will save it. You can tell because I'm writing this from my own ActivityPub server I built from scratch :P
(adversarial interoperability is still needed to make the world better, though — especially in things like instant messaging)