Comment by pilarphosol
3 years ago
Walled gardens are unfortunately the future of the internet.
The public web is full of bots and adversarial content. Worse, anything you contribute in good faith can be used against you in the future by businesses and governments. Even in the rare case where those institutions are trustworthy, there is no guarantee of them being that way. So, the public web’s only power users are those who seek to influence others, who are therefore adversarial toward any higher minded purpose.
Balkanisation and fragmentation, unfortunately, seem to be at least our near future.
But how does this overlap with federated platforms? Then you can still balkanize into tiny groups but federate among compatible groups to rebuild larger networks bottom-up (I like to draw a comparison to how multicellular organisms are composed of many discrete cells). And if you don't federate with hosts that serve businesses, you can fly way under the radar (Pleroma even has built-in onion routing support IIRC).