I've been thinking about the walled garden thing recently. Several of my friends who are /long/-time users of FB - thanks to its ability to gather scatterlings from across the world - have started talking about creating (logically) local and durable (not lost in the ad-injected update feed) content, memories and information.

As someone who long since gave up trying to provide that type of thing (because corps did it better/faster with no learning curve, excellent reach, etc), I find this shift interesting. It speaks of non-technical people wanting to have real control of their own content; not some token effort that ultimately enables monetization.

To me, there is still value in the ideas behind older unix services and protocols; things like gopher, old-school blogs (pre mega-corp platforms), irc chat, usenet, etc.

I see ActivityPub and IPFS as interesting developments; I'd love to know what other tools we could string together to help create other (presumably connected but distributed / federated?) spaces that aren't backed by a monetization engine.

It would be neat to see a "distro" that stood up a node with long and short-form content, chat, news and "groups" capabilities. Something a keen but inexperienced individual could spin up on AWS / GCP / DO / Azure, etc.

Am I crazy?

PS: Wasn't chat solved by Jabber (now xmpp)? IIRC, Yahoo and Google at the time didn't support it (other than by using brittle bridges).