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I'm wondering if the end of Mainstream social media will be caused by fragmentation. (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@hexbear.net
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The fact that all of the major platforms are changing hands, having to change due to government bans or laws, or from CEOs who force changes people don't like into their platforms.

Then and a bunch of others cropping up trying to take their place.

not that I would mind considering that the entire mainstream internet is now 5 or 6 websites owned by 3 or 4 people and all of them are either fucking awful, have TONS of ads on them or Boost Right Wingers and Bigots while censoring LGBTQ content

Overall, I'm kinda hopeful and Scared about the future of the internet

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[–] 26 points 2 years ago (4 children)

The One Big Website situation is an anomaly. We used to churn through "the place to be" every couple of years.

This is so overdue. Don't be scared.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Things were REALLY fucking bleak 10-15 years ago. Even though they are still relatively small, the growth of alternative places like Lemmy and Mastodon, along with a sort of rebirth of independent websites and blogs has been very inspiring. It is nowhere near mainstream, but there is a growing community in the collective disdain for Silicon Valley. More and more, people have grown to understand that websites being driven into the ground isn't a coincidence of poor management, but a fundamental law of Capitalism. People in general are a lot less naive than they used to be.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    But has the government ever gone this far to ban access to one of the largest information hubs for political reasons? This seems right out of the red scare

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    what's unprecedented is that the government couldn't buy it out and make themselves a mega client with personal backdoors for metadata and controlling discussion via opaque TOS violations.

    plenty of other platforms were once places where people organized and shared information, but the US ultimately controlled the places where they were hosted directly or through vassal relations.

    the PRC has no such relationship with the US and has developed its own, novel platforms that humans like. the geopolitics is what's new and it makes the censorship tactics new.

    the government had to step in to overtly ban since it couldn't quietly subvert and coopt it or force ISPs to send threatening letters by opening them up to liability for the sharks of extremely large capital formations. or just straight up paying ISPs off to throttle types of traffic.

    to examine the recent history of the internet and platforms rise & falls with a critical perspective seems to reveal the game doesn't change, just the players and the technologies. 20+ years ago a VPN tunnel was a relatively obscure tool mostly used by corporations to provide off-site access to authenticated users accessing secured network resources. now it's the ballgame for bypassing restrictive licensing agreements. a hilarious hijacking.

    shit people used to buy movies and software, now they buy the right to subscribe to a platform that can change terms or go dark whenever. and they think this is normal/acceptable.

    the cool parts of the internet have always been wackamole for monetization or, when that doesn't work, destruction. I still remember when the cops were raiding and seizing TBP servers every few months, even though the courts never ruled in the state's favor. pure attrition.

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