The idea of free information is incompatible with the existence of corporations that profit from its commodification. The battle to make information free is the battle for an entirely different world.
The idea of free information is incompatible with the existence of corporations that profit from its commodification. The battle to make information free is the battle for an entirely different world.
The promise of the internet would help people see different views and then we’d come to find common truths sort of the way scientific consensus works. Instead, what we got are echo chambers where people are only exposed to opinions that they agree with. I suspect that corporate ownership of media platforms plays a big role in that. Pretty much every corporate platform uses some sort of an opaque algorithm to decide what content people see, and these algorithms are designed to maximize engagement. So, people end up seeing what they want to see.
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I absolutely agree, we can see how the internet completely changed once it started becoming commercialized. We got to the point where most people just visit a handful of websites like Reddit and Facebook. That said, I’m very optimistic about the emergence of the fediverse because it brings back the way the internet was meant to function. While the fediverse is still tiny, it is steadily growing, and it provides a serious alternative to corporate internet.
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I expect to see growth of non profit social networking where people run servers as a hobby without a monetary incentive. This is what we saw happening a lot at the dawn of the internet with people running BBS boards, IRC channels, and small personal sites. I think platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon capture some of the same appeal and a lot of people are starting become disillusioned with profit driven models. We’ll see how things develop I guess.
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So far, it seems like a lot of fairly large instances are doing well with the donation model. Only a small percentage of users have to contribute to pay for the hosting costs. Again, this worked the same way with the old internet as well. I don’t think the outcome of the fediverse being commercialized is inevitable or even likely.
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Non commercial internet never did go away though, it’s just become more niche. I think these things ebb and flow. The pendulum swings one way and then the other. :)