Agreed. Big tech platforms make it easy for everyone to participate. But while we gained simplicity, we lost control and independence and creativity. Every website isn't supposed to look the same. And our expression and activity isn't supposed to just be grist for the data mill.

I remember fondly the days of early broadband, when tons of people would run a server on an old laptop for an IRC bot or a shoutcast stream or whatever. We need that back. I hear about people doing that with Lemmy instances and Matrix homeservers and the like and it makes my heart sing.

Twitter and reddit won't implode. But hopefully they keep all the users who just want to mindlessly scroll through low effort content and the smarter ones join the fediverse.