Mastodawn

Tom Walker Nov 13, 2022

There was once a dream of a decentralised web.

As recently as a decade ago we had a still very active blogosphere, connected via blogrolls and RSS. Specialised web forums were still mainstream and messenger apps could largely interoperate.

Centralised social media slowly ate that dream. It had plenty of positives, but it pulled more and more people away from the open web and into corporate walled gardens.

Some people kept the dream of decentralisation alive. And now you are here.

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Michael Uhl Nov 14, 2022

@tomw I’ve found the growth of centralized social media to be a demoralizing thing.

I wonder about the “positives” that you posit for centralized social media - ease of discovery is the only one that comes to mind… and even there, it brings other downsides: you now need to have “verification” to know if the person you found is the person that you actually wanted.

All I know is that the just the idea of decentralized social media makes me happier than I was.

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skinnyraf

@uhl_me @tomw overlap of bubbles is something that was very limited with separate forums typically covering specific topics. While general forums existed, they were often complete cesspits. We had "off -topic" sections on forums and specific discussions often drifted, but this was very limited due to typically skewed demographics on each forum. Centralised and federated social media are general, have large user base and hashtags/boosts/retweets allow easy spreading of content.