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?
Consolidations of forums onto subreddit style systems including Lemmy. They almost completely replaced individual forums with subtopics.
While Lemmy is still open the consolidations really cut down on the independence of a lot of the older forums or even whole sites.