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?
people.
people don’t like openness and freedom. it’s scary. they prefer to be coddled by walled gardens and curated experiences that make sure they don’t come across anything they find unpleasant or disagreeable.
most people are very happy to be spoonfed bias-confirming garbage their entire life, and re-regurgitating it out again. the open internet is a huge threat to those people.
Capitalism. To a capitalist, the internet is another domain to squeeze until the last penny drops. Big corporations like Google don’t care about the internet being useful to people, they have only one objective: make number go up. And if that means smashing the web to pieces, you can guarantee they’ll try.
Highly recommend everyone read yasha levine’s surveillance valley for a lot of the specifics on this, looking at the internet in particular.
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.
Boohoo, the open web is broken…
- You caused it, MF’ers…
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.
capitalism i guess
Trolling and doxxing are a big part of it. A lot of people (not me, obviously) don’t want to share anything real online if it’s going to be used against them.
What would you do if everyone was live streaming their day to day lives using AI glasses?
Nope. I’d never leave my house.
The love of money. Making a profit is not enough, it has to be growing and accelerating all the time.
Yeah, the ideal of the internet was that, ultimately, we would all have our own little box in our house that we would post our stuff to, and our friends would read it and see it, and maybe a few passers by on the internet would observe it, and that would be a way of journaling our lives and sharing them with each other.
Instead of being a global hearth, it has become a global marketplace, a battleground for power in the form of advertising revenue, sales revenue, and tracking every bit of data they can possibly get from you.
This is so that, 1, they can sell more things to you, and 2, so they can sell that information to other people who, like themselves, do not have your best interest in mind and do not care one fuck about you.
“economies of scale”
Whether you like it or not, its censorship. Ppl with opposite political views silencing eachother creating echo chambers of only ppl who align with them politically.
Things are too strict now, every one has a mega phone and wants to shout at eachother and their opinion. The internet has become one big political pile of shit, most actually chill ppl, avoid it as a source of escapism.
Barrier to entry. Not enough laid back open minded ppl. So now, everyone’s separated and closed off. Ppl just want control
It’s not about connection and getting information, it’s all about pushing some fucking agenda.
has majorly spilled over into real life as well. way too many anxious control freaks these days, not enough chill people who are willing to listen and learn.
Polarisation and capitalism, with algorithms and mass surveillance.
As a Brit… Government policy is doing a pretty good job. Everything is making running an independent site completely infeasible. They’re legislating as if the only people who run sites are big tech corporations who have money to burn on compliance.
It’s almost as if that was the entire idea.
Corporate consolidation is the end goal and all of the others are part of the toolkit for accomplishing that. (You can use those tools for other things, but a hammer with blood on it is a murder weapon no matter how many nails are in it’s past or future)
I think that we need more hybrid online/irl communities. Half of these issues at least can be avoided by treating digital spaces as the temporary fever dreams they are.
I think that we need more hybrid online/irl communities.
- There’s actually been some recent attempts to do exactly that, eg. zine communities have been getting big on ATproto recently, as well as art/craft communities in general.
services not protocols
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.
Big brands like Google, Microsoft, Facebook
Walled Garden sides, they should be forbidden
Closed source software
Non federated services like chats
Last time I thought Matrix ran on ActivityPub like the rest of the Fediverse, though.
Matrix is federated but it is its own protocol. It doesn’t use ActivityPub.
Greed
