Angus McIntyreMay 2, 2024

This excellent article by @molly0xfff reminded me of the sci-fi trope where everyone in the future lives in a domed bunker & gets told not to go outside because it's a wasteland filled with Bad People.

Of course the protagonists leave the dome & find that the reality is a bit different: outside can be scary, but it's not the hellscape they were told.

Big Tech walled gardens are the dome; outside them is a risky wonderland that’s ours for the taking.

Leave the dome.

https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/

We can have a different web

Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

Citation Needed
Show threadJordan RoherMay 2, 2024

@angusm @molly0xfff I love Molly, but this article didn't work for me. I quickly got lost among the metaphors.

I was hoping for some acknowledgement of the fact that most people like the walled gardens. They work better for those who don't chuckle at an apt hex code in a username. And unlike e.g. iOS v. Android, no one is trapped in any particular garden. You can join as many as you like.

Plus, there's some benefit to the Eternal September people having a place to go and just be people.

Show threadTor Iver Wilhelmsen
@jordan @angusm @molly0xfff They love the walled gardens just because they don’t know of the alternatives. Sure, the alternatives can be more complex, like driving your own car is harder than taking the bus. But that is basically what they are doing. They are the passengers, not the drivers.
May 2, 2024 at 9:40pmWeb
Show threadJordan RoherMay 2, 2024

@toriver @angusm @molly0xfff But the complexity is the problem for normies. You can't make a distributed, decentralized, permissionless system that beats the user experience of a centralized rival.

Don't get me wrong: I love the Fediverse, I self-host over a dozen services, I wrote an open source dashboard.

But I do that because I enjoy it. Most people don't. They just want to message friends, write docs, listen to music, all of which is so much easier in a "garden."