Suddenly half the population is realizing the cons of centralized platforms. Curious if this moment sparks renewed interest in decentralized tech of yesteryear ie the good ol world wide web.
If the web were invented today, there's not a chance in hell Apple would approve a web browser as an app. If you really think about that, I think you'll agree that current app store policies are harmful to innovation and harmful to society as a whole.
At the end of the day, tech can only get you so far. You need to have a broader societal acceptance of a norm of freedom.
The US is trending, quite radically, in the opposite direction.
Thankfully, there is a web browser.
But corporations want us to use apps instead of web browser to restrict this. Like, everything must be an app. Every social network basically forces their app down your throat. "Ew you use a browser, what a loser"
We were pretty centralised around a few locations like slashdot & newsgroups.
Walled gardens were a thing, here in the UK a service called CIX was popular but AOL is the big famous one.
It’s not that we communicated less, group messaging with non-techie friends was done over email - cue flashback to 300-message deep top-posted replies.
It’s not that we were better in any way, the anarchist’s cookbook cost many a high school several new sets of door locks. Back orifice was a thing and was used for real scummy purposes sometimes.
I landed at profit motive as the difference. Just before the era of spyware is where i’m thinking it fell apart but I’m not at all confident in my assessment.
Scale begets financial interest, btw.
Or maybe about 45% of 70% of the population.
Sources: Pew Research says registered voters are about evenly split between R (29%),D (33%), and independent (34%), and also notes that the independents are pretty evenly split between “leans R” and “leans D” for a total of 44/49% here: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/26/what-the-20...
And the Census bureau says about 70% of the population is registered to vote, with about 60% voting in 2016 here: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/election-day.html
(Feel free to go find stats for 2020 for both of those, I can’t be bothered)
Also as a moderator of a Mastodon instance, I can say that this decentralized tech is quite capable of making people STFU, I sure have defederated with a constantly growing list of fediverse nodes full of the exact same kind of shit featured in these Parler screenshots because I just do not wanna talk to anyone like that.
I'm seeing a lot of talk about standing up competing platforms. I'm seeing a lot of talk about destroying incumbents, as through antitrust. I'm seeing some promotion of specific, arguably decentralized, alternatives. But the more successful of those do a lot to hide "decentralized" as an implementation detail, since so few potential users understand, much less care.
And yup, I noticed I'm not even on firefox right now.