The platform era is ending. Rather than build new Twitters and Facebooks, we can create a stuff-posting system that works better for everybody.
The poster’s guide to the internet of the future
I wish you linked to the Mastodon version of this comic, instead of the bird site: https://mastodon.social/@MrLovenstein/112054862268601490
Fair!
I understand and obviously agree or else I wouldn't be vaguely gestures to everyone around him
But let's not live in fantasy land. Capitalism rules the internet and like it's old predecessor Feudalism there's one rule. Bigger Army (bank account) diplomacy. None of the other rules matter if you're big enough to write them. Nobody will willingly give up their level of control of the internet and everyone who takes it will do so with the objective of replacing them not dethroning
Open source will eventually create viable platforms, I'm not giving up until platforms successfully campaign to kill free alternatives
Yeah. We've already seen this effect with WordPress and Android and Apache/Nginx. There was a day when I was weird for betting against MS IIS for web hosting, and people were sure the commercial Internet would remain proprietary forever.
(The most generous current estimate of IIS market share for Internet hosting is 3%, and that's probably being extremely generous. A more likely number is under .5%.)
We saw companies try and fail to privatize HTML many times: (ActiveX, Flash, SilverLight, various versions of IE).
Open specifications always win.
The software's not the problem though. Infrastructure isn't free. You can self-host Lemmy off your own broadband for a while, but as your site grows this'll become infeasible. So then you have to host on someone else's hardware: AWS or whatever, and paying a few 10s or maybe a few 100s of currency per month is fine, but then suddenly you go viral and get clobbered with a bill for 50K.
Plus of course there's the time you need to spend working on the service. It isn't paying, by definition, so not only are you not getting an income from it you're also not able to work at something else which could give you an income. This is fine for rich playboys but not for the rest of us wage slaves.
And so you need an income to sustain the service, and thus the descent into enshittification begins. This will only be solved when we get free infrastructure, but how?
I assume if Lemmy ever got big enough to be an actual threat, the big guys would do something about it. I’m not sure what though, but something.
It will be monetized at some point. It's free data and people are scraping it. Google will inject ads via Chrome until people move to another browser, who knows. Capitalism always finds a way.
It’s not a war to win. What’s best will eventually succeed, though 🤷🏻♂️ The future is decentralized because - sooner or later- every idiot will realize that putting absolute power in the hands of few that control our speech is maybe not the best idea. Now, that may lay far in the future, but it is the future nonetheless.
I mean, this is what the internet started out as; and I think we're slowly coming back around to it.
Anyone wanna join my webring? I mean...uhh...my fediverse? Or whatever?
For real, with the shitty state of modern search engines I'd love to see the return of webrings.
Some sort of reputation system with incentives to avoid low effort posts or spam perhaps?
Not going to happen. The majority of users are tech illiterate. They have no idea to set this up nor any desire to pay domain name fees and web hosting fees....
Only a few techies like us might do it but nothing more than that.
Plus it doesn't work the way they think. I already have a blog and occasionally post there and share it to social media. All the interaction, if there is any, happens on social, not on my blog.
Blogs are simply a place to post long form content but not designed for massive amount of replies and social interaction.
The problem is dns, we have to kill dns and the verisign-industrial-complex.
"Stuff posting"
So, BBSes and Newsgroups.
What, you thought social media was ever anything more?
Everything old is new again. But are we gonna go back to dialup modems for a purer analog hipster lifestyle?
Exactly completely different use cases i personnely think fediverse or rather dicentralised is the future
This is how the Internet was always meant to be. You're supposed to create and host your own content, then link to content on other sites. Silos are useful but they've gone too far. An established system for sharing media like this needed to happen.
As much as I love decentralization and activitypub, this is very ignorant for ignoring lock in and network effect
This old article isn't really about that. It's arguing for posting everywhere, including in silos and linking back. If anything, it's talking about the opposite of what you're alluding to. I don't find the argument that format doesn't matter convincing though. What you post on tiktok isn't the same as a voluminous blog post or a YouTube video. Sounds like a lot of work.
I have a blog and a gallery on my own domain. I just want a system for people to interact and recommend my blog and photos that isn't WordPress, and that is so damn hard to find. A federated wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff that connects existing sites.
Some kind of ring that links webs together?
None of that is new, it’s just not profitable and so we (humankind) dropped it.
Webrings were cool but flawed. I'd like something like tumblr, where you can comment and @ someone, but in a federated system where each would manage their own.
I thought about using Mastodon as a comment system for my blog but the tools to accomplish it are way over my head. I'm not a developer, just someone who happens to know how to install a CMS and to tweak some HTML and CSS.
Wish someone would build one that made it really easy to connect to everyone in your email and phone contacts. Instead we have Twitter 2 electric boogaloo.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Instead of a half-dozen platforms competing to own your entire life, apps like Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and others are building a more interconnected social ecosystem.
In the last year or so, though, particularly after Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition alerted users to how quickly their platforms can change or die, POSSE has gotten some traction again alongside ActivityPub and other more open ideas.
POSSE’s problems start at the very beginning: it requires owning your own website, which means buying a domain and worrying about DNS records and figuring out web hosts, and by now, you’ve already lost the vast majority of people who would rather just type a username and password into some free Meta platform.
Reece says he’s interested in building tools to aggregate and make sense of replies, likes, comments, and the rest, but it’s a much harder prospect.
Reece mentions a tool called Bridgy, which both allows cross-posting and aggregates social media reactions and attaches them to posts on your site.
Modern social networks are not a single product but a giant bundle of features, and the next generation of tools might be all about unbundling.
The original article contains 1,805 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 90%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This repost is so old that it is the very first tab in my browser. For the record, I have [] tabs open. I have had [] tabs open from some time in 2023. That's how old it is.
I'm still stuck in 2022 in my head, so this is still pretty fresh :o)
Yeah, getting old sucks. I'm still 25 in my head, but my body constantly reminds me that I'm over 30, and that it is slowly falling apart like a decrepit abandoned car.
I guess what I was trying to say is: we have crossposting between communities, what prevents us from crossposting between years as well? :)
Hi from the stuff posting system.
If we decide to get shirts, they need to say "Stuff Posting System".
"What kind of stuff?"
"Linux memes, mostly."
The trouble is keeping the stuff posting system from turning the post stuffing system.
With an arrow pointing down 😏
I'm stuff