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Title: Social Web
Date: 2023-06-10
Device: Macbook
Mood: Is hot a mood?
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I'm sat in the garden today. It's very warm;
breezy too, but the breezy just brings a slightly
different kind of warmth. We have a weather
warning for thunderstorms later, so we'll see what
that brings.
I'm encouraged at the moment by the social web and
the fediverse. There's a growing understanding
that the fabric of our online lives can't be run
in a VC-backed, for-profit manner.
I don't post much on Reddit (mainly in
/r/stopdrinking where I encourage people), and my
read:post ratio is probably 999:1. In the past,
I've blocked reddit.com at my DNS, mainly to save
my own attention span, but the blocks only last
for a few months at a time until I really need to
understand some obscure tech thing which has only
been discussed on Reddit. I guess that's what
Teddit was for, but I never really took that to
heart.
Even among 'normal' users. If the current Reddit
situation, and the 'blackout' don't lead to any
meaningful permanant change, at least they are
going to lead to the fediverse and Free
alternatives creeping in at the edges of the
narrative. I could have posted the same about
Twitter a few months back. It'll take a long time
to build inertia and overcome the convenience, but
we will get there.
Here's an optimistic take; rather than seeing the
last 30 years of internet discourse as a journey
from open-and-free to corporatized-and-paid, maybe
the our current situation is the difficult
adolescence of the internet? Maybe we have emerged
on the other side of the abberant decade; where we
let private interests control the signal. Are we
finally getting back on track?
Anyway, I joined our Mastodon; I'm
@
[email protected] if you'd like to see photos
of me walking the dog and occasionally my garden.
--C
