Month: December 2024

OK warning, this blog post got rather ranty, and goes toward my reasoning of exactly why I would kind of like the internet of around 17 years ago back. I was thinking 2008, but Twitter was starting to become mainstream then, so nope!
an article in the NYT says “no service will save us, and we shouldn’t expect one to.” Well yeah, no kidding! If you expect an internet service and/or platform to save you, you have major problems too big to name!
It is a lesson in decentralization and federation. We should not expect a service to “save” us, in fact, we should look to open standards and protocols that were built at the beginning of the internet. Sometimes not the beginning, ActivityPub is a fairly recent protocol, as of the last eight years or so. However, a decent amount of probably US leftists and liberals who are flocking to BlueSky right now are the exact people who are saying something like, Mastodon is too confusing for me!, and I can’t use it.
They’re also saying they don’t want to have anything to do with X, and that’s fine. I have my own reasons for not wanting to use that service often. Mostly because when Musk layed off the accessibility team, which is when he showed he really didn’t care about anyone with a disability whatsoever! He also failed to allow any sort of third-party client catering to disabled users free access to the API.
The thing is, the entire Fediverse, things like Mastodon, and Pleroma, were built by mostly people on the left. . that may seem offensive to some, or that I’m generalizing, I did say “mostly,” I do not follow daily development extraordinarily closely. Although we actually have proof of this, because when Gab came to Mastodon, a whole lot of people, including developers and instance maintainers wanted Gab blocked. Accept me, and a few people who support free speech. I don’t support or use Gab now, especially after their accessibility took a dump, but I did in 2016-2018.
It’s also a lesson on service decay, no I refuse to use the newspeak term that Doctoro made up late last year because I’m not a fan of cussing online, and like most newspeak terms, it is in fact thought-ending. You could say the entire world is going to crap, not just the internet, and yet someone conveniently made up a 1984-style term to explain what’s happening to the internet, so now we’re all just expected to use it. We used to say, “something is dead,” or “something jumped the shark,” now we must use the term that Doctoro made up. It’s also called platform decay, so from now on I’ll use that term. However standards don’t really “decay,” as it were. There can be a deprecation of standards, but if you deprecate RSS, for instance, you deprecate podcasting. You would also deprecate part of the ActivityPub protocol, I believe. Now you might be thinking, well… people don’t podcast much these days, and do most of their stuff on Youtube ETC. However, if someone has a podcast, what they’re most likely doing is syndicating to Youtube. They’re probably also live streaming on top of that, so it depends on which feed gets it first, but it doesn’t really matter, because Youtube also supports RSS. Although you may have to watch most things after the fact.