I’m seeing an incredible turn towards the kind of organic platforms of the 1.0 web world. They may never hit the same level of popularity as the commercial platforms like Facebook and Twitter did, but these new platforms like Lemmy, Mastodon, and others are letting us build a new space.
Probably the best part is that so much of it is built on FOSS meaning that the monetization and enshitification by investors will have a much harder time taking root.
Meta is already trying to destroy the Fediverse.
Yeah but the beautiful thing about the fediverse is that instance admins can just be like “lol no, fuck you” and defederate, and moreover coordinate to blacklist anything affiliated with Meta et al.
And then there’s people like me who, as a result of the election, have started to think about how they could go work for tech in the context of some sort of fifth-column effort, because I fucking HATE the amount of societal damage these hypercapitalist megacorps are doing. But of course I would only do that in Minecraft.
They can try but they’ll never be able to reach all instances that defederates from them. Meta and the rest of the fediverse will be like two non-overlapping ecosystems.
FOSS is like penicillin honest to god…
Agree, but I fear they try to get those apps banned, similarly to what happened to tiktok (yes I know it’s not FOSS) because the only reason why it was banned was because it was killing the revenue of FB and Twitter.
You’re asking that question in one of the places where it will be evolving. The fediverse, or something like it, is the future of the internet.
It’ll still ‘evolve,’ just not in a pro-user way.
Never say never. Once the VCs wake up and realize there is no ROI left they will take their billions out of the pool and 90% of companies will struggle to actually create value from a hostile userbase.
I think 90% of the AI investments really have no commercial viability and are being developed for VC investments.
I feel like smartphones have just made people “internet lazy” - myself included. The masses just want to get an app and let it accomplish whatever you need, without worrying about any kind of enshitification as long as it’s free.
But you’re here, so that’s a good sign.
“free”
Younger people I talk to have absolutely normalized “I saw this on Instagram!” As a way of shopping.
I hate apps and refuse to use them in almost all cases, unless they’re FOSS or collect little to no data.
There’s an app for that!
Never is a long time
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The internet, no. World Wide Web, unlikely. Commercial domains however have been shit and will continue to enshittify as long as people support their business models.
There’s a phrase that I learned recently that feels relevant to this. “Hermeneutical Injustice”. It means injustice that arises when we are literally unable to meaningfully discuss our experiences with others. For example, “sexual harassment” is a relatively recent phrase, coined in the 1970s, a period when more women were entering the workplace, and employers didn’t have policies for how to respond to workplace sexual harassment. It’s a useful phrase, both legally, and interpersonally, and having access to this phrase that describes something that was previously hard to articulate (“you quit your job because your boss was complimenting you?”) has helped us to reduce hermeneutic injustice by helping us to better understand and respond to the underlying phenomena (for instance, we now understand that people of all genders may experience workplace sexual harassment)
“Hermeneutic injustice” is why I think the ridiculous prevalence of the word “enshittification” is a good thing. People have latched into that because although it may be a new word, the phenomena it describes have been happening for a while now. I’ve even seen less techy people using it. The anger I’ve been seeing extends beyond people who know about “enshittification”, but its spread and usage is a useful snapshot of how many are feeling. It makes me feel hopeful.
I’m sleepy right now so I’ll not attempt to discuss more concrete things driving this hope (such as “small web”, Fediverse etc.), but the short of it is that I have a lot of faith in people. Leaning on our communities is how we survive and resist this bullshit, and there will always be people who want to build things for the love of it.
Well put, I think at first as well I felt like the term was a bit immature and used a bit too liberally when it first started picking up steam in 2023.
It really does describe a phenomenon that is becoming so widespread that I’ve softened on it and embraced it (as long as it’s used correctly)
So the answer is no but only because the web is only one part of the internet. Someone somewhere will create a new protocol that we never thought off and start a new service and no I’m not taking about the web3 scam and crypto. Stuff like gemini and tildeverse are pockets of the 90s internet. Still alive and kicking.
See the enshitified hotspots as fly traps for the limp minded. An authentic, simple, commerce free web is still out there, one just needs to look outside of the drivel served up on page one of mainstream search engines
Never is a long time. Significant damage? Certainly.
No, the platforms are enshittifiying, but the underlying nuts and bolts of the internet are still there untouched and so far every attempt by big tech to enshittifiy/proprietarize those has thus far failed
The search engines don’t do what they used to do. New sites cannot gain traction without million dollar advertising budgets.
Meh, fuck the search engines, let’s bring back webrings!!
Never could.
They absolutely could. I built several of them back in the day.
Let’s go back to dialup and BBS forums over cmd
I’m down but much of the landlines have been converted to VOIP and won’t handle dialup any more :(
Self hosting:
No, that would be impossible.
So… I’m not sure if this is an entirely rational thought.
I’d always wanted to do ham radio but hadn’t bothered. Before my time, ham radio let you do amazing things that weren’t otherwise very easy. Like have a group chat with a bunch of people all over the world. Except when I was looking for things to do, you could get on the Internet and chat with a bunch of people all over the world … without the antennas and hardware and all.
Lately some stuff happened and my spouse’s friend who lives near Asheville NC and lived through the flooding there where ham radio was the only working form of communications, so my spouse got pressured into buying a radio, which means that I got myself a license because … well, radio works without much infrastructure?
Mostly I figure I needed to fill the void that was getting on Twitter if something happened locally.
I also want to get into ham radio and have been messing with sites like this to scratch the itch for now.
