Centralisation vs decentralisation in tech is pretty much irrelevant.
What is relevant is governance. We allow billionaires and venture capitalists to govern a commons that we all rely on. Surprise surprise, it isn't going well.
The solution is not to have (difficult to scale) federated alternatives. The solution is collective ownership.
Imagine for a moment that the multinationals that are increasingly in charge of our lives were owned by their customers. Imagine they had a fair electoral system, reflecting the variety of those users, limiting them to one person, one vote, and that their constitutions were designed to guarantee the rights of minorities.
The journey that most countries went on through the 20th and 21st centuries, in other words.
Tech giants and other multinationals are a different kind of beast, because they govern a little slice of our lives instead of having carte blanche. But it is not beyond the realm of possibility for democratically operated multinationals to exist. It will be hard to do, but IMO, that approach has a bright future because non-techies can grasp it and participate in it more easily, and that is one less barrier to a runaway network effect than the fediverse has.
Can you not have both? Each federated instance costs money to upkeep. Some instances could elect for collective ownership or even elect to donate for develop (probably this needs to be carefully considered to deter corporate ownership). I like your idea but I think there needs to be an interim step and for now, maybe that's federation. Maybe we'll get to the place you speak of... one day.
We won't get there while people would rather rely on doing a bit of systems administration and hoping a developer can pay the bills. Not without strictly ideologically motivated admins and devs.
Distributed power takes more effort. Of course people naturally trend towards lazy over the generations because it's easier and more efficient at the cost of everything it was initially supposed to be. And now we are where we are: executive branch agencies legislating.
That's why we shouldn't optimize everything, the longer I live the more I understand that overoptimization is the root of all evil. We should analyse what we are doing and how we are changing things in the long term, monitor the situation and adjust accordingly. Otherwise our systems will find a local optimum that benefit the most powerful groups. Happens in all aspects of life, modern capitalism being the prime example.
It's that old tradeoff - convenience vs. single point of failure. Unfortunately, we're getting to see now what that single point of failure does to us. A big chunk of the open web is winking out of existence at this very moment.
There is a failure of technology too. The internet is distributed, sure, but the server-client architecture puts all the operational burden on the server. The expectation that everyone will run their own internet exposed instance of any thing is still simply not feasible, even today. The operational complexity of security, availability, monitoring etc are unmanageable even for technical users. Back when smaller forums were popular, hearing of a forum getting hacked was pretty much the norm. They get hacked, they go down for few days, they come back from a backup losing few days or hours of data, and on to the next vbulletin. Phpbb, nuke, or whatever vulnerability/hack. There doesn’t yet exist a distributed system that can replace something like facebook, twitter, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, instagram, or even WhatsApp without a significant operational burden or added complexity.
It’s also not a very interesting problem to solve because of the type of cliffs you will run into due to precisely how the “internet works”
Doesn't come as a surprise when you look at how openly hostile the open source community still is to prioritizing user experiences and supporting tech-illiterate users in general.
FOSS, fediverse, IPFS all had their chance, and they blew it. Corporations were the ones who opened up the internet to the 99% of people who would otherwise never have been there at all, and now they want to collect their cut.
To be completely fair, FOSS' marketing budget is orders of magnitude smaller than these corporation's budgets. Not to say that you're wrong but I suspect that's more like a drop in the bucket compared to marketing.
Even now, these federated sites on the rise have technicial growing pains. And those will probably take years to get through until it's to a point where everyone can use it with little friction.
Twitter made a convenient, easy to use, centralized (which is an absolute positive for user experience), social media product that attracted people, by their own free will. The number of people using a social media service amplifies its "usefulness", so the more people, the stronger it attracts new users.
We didn't put the internet in the hands of these corporations. We walked over and sat in their, easy to use, hands.
The internet was conceived as a democratic haven, a realm where every individual had the potential to influence and shape their digital experience. However, a pervasive dip in technological literacy and a rising dependency on heavily-guided online pathways has begun to shift this balance. If this trend persists, corporations will continue to maintain their overarching dominion.
A dynamic, user-driven community still thrives in the vast expanse of the digital world, yet it lies hidden beyond the towering edifices of corporate-controlled structures. Discovering these spaces has become an increasingly formidable task, as the infusion of corporate social content into journalistic and blogging platforms perpetuates the mirage that such networks are all that exist.
Each colossal tech corporation we see today began its journey as a modest, affable endeavor. As these projects expanded with their burgeoning popularity, users neglected to challenge the escalating influence and control these companies wielded.
Nitter was merely an alternative facade to Twitter. Despite offering an ad-free environment, it lacked substantial advantages as the underlying platform remained the same - Twitter.
However, the digital realm is not void of choices. Federated social media is emerging as a profound alternative. Yet, a majority of those voicing concerns about corporate social media seem to dismiss options like Mastodon. This is primarily due to their increased technological demands and people's comfort in having a corporation guide their online journey.
The power to reshape your digital footprint rests in your hands. You can sever ties with your corporate social media accounts. You can choose to eschew media that incessantly embeds corporate social media content. You can advocate for an internet not ruled by corporate influence. All it requires is the willingness to venture beyond the realm of comfort.
> The internet was conceived as a democratic haven, a realm where every individual had the potential to influence and shape their digital experience.
I have a hard time reconciling this perspective with history. Were any of these ideals present among the people/organizations responsible for the internet and the Web at the time that they were being developed? Or is sentiment like yours something that people adopted later on?
I was speaking more to the ethos that arose as the internet was opened up to the public and began to evolve in the late 20th century. You are correct that this is a far cry from its initial conception as a military communications network (ARPANET).
The internet was conceived as a DARPA concept of reliable government communications in the face of unreliable transport, among many other research interests. For most of its early existence (through at least the NSFnet incarnation in the US), it was the private preserve of academic, government and military users, along with some of the corporations that supported them and commercial use beyond supporting projects was prohibited (e.g. you couldn't use it for advertising). It was far from a 'Democratic haven'. There were epic flamewars over 'do we let any more commercial content in our private backyard?' and 'why would we let regular people in?'.
However, a pervasive dip in technological literacy...
Right...it's bad we let the proles into utopia. So much for 'democratic havens'.
If you can't get the basic background right, it really damages the credibility of the rest of the screed (which I mostly agree with).
We the people were inactive & didn't figure out how to weave together our individual & community sites to create a compelling multi-party space.
Or we could try to create alternative centralized but non-corporate systems. Not sure what other options there are.
I don't like where we are either. But new power has to be created. Hard work of figuring out protocols to converse across & usefully home our content/words on is sort of just beginning.
"The internet" isn't in their hands, the "Pop Web" (eg, pop music) is. Plenty of other internet out there, it's just time for people to start paying attention to it again.
At university I was using JANET, and in some ways it was better than what we have now.
I don't think they'd have ever bothered inventing privacy violating trackers A/B testing (though if I'm wrong this is the best place to assert wildly and be quickly corrected).
You said it would be nothing without tech companies.
Without tech companies, it was still immensely useful.
Apps on iPhones? Great, but the internet doesn't need them to be hugely culturally and socially important — and I'm saying that as an iPhone app developer since before the first iPad came out.
That's a false dichotomy. Government-regulated doesn't mean government-run. I wish we had laws in place that would prevent Facebook/Apple/Google/Twitter monopolies/walled gardens from happening
