It feels like the web is becoming more closed every year — fewer open forums, more platforms locking away data and communities behind logins. What do you think are the biggest forces driving the decline of the open internet? Are walled gardens like Discord the main problem, or is it something else like artificial intelligence, corporate consolidation, surveillance, or changing user habits?
Google’s the main contributor to closing the web off, they even straight-up admitted to that a few months ago and tried to DRM the web with WEI, but that failed with massive backlash.
But yeah, walled gardens like Discord, Google, Meta, and Twitter certainly aren’t helping matters, and even some of the alternatives got some controversy of their own, eg. Bsky recently censoring people on their main PDS, although given ATproto is an open protocol, there’s no one and nothing stopping you from setting up an account on a third-party PDS like Blacksky or Northsky, or hosting your own, for example.
Apart from that, more open and decentralized/self-hostable alternatives need to crop up and fast, and we already have ATProto, ActivityPub/the Fediverse, PeerSuite, XMPP, and even LBRY/Odysee.