Comment by zilti
1 year ago
I wonder what it will be like in a few years. How much worse can it get? Will the web be a desolate wasteland with a few social media pages people "flee" to, while the more tech savvy will start using alternative platforms again, like Gemini, IRC, etc.?
In the worst case I could see content platforms start competing on those terms and a resulting winner-take-all consolidation to the point that “the internet” becomes synonymous with WinnerPlatform. (This has already happened to some degree with things like government offices making official announcements exclusively on closed platforms like X or Facebook.) There will always be nerds and hackers who have small personal sites, but the internet would be falling short of its potential if, for example, you needed a Facebook account to participate in government.
A bit ironic that the very thing the web freed itself from already once (walled gardens from the likes of AOL) now comes back again much stronger.