For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—
I hate the idea that everything should be monetised, that only gives us loong videos with laughing heads and so on “to keep you engaged”.
We’re here without all that crap and well the fediverse is definitely less active but it’s content made by people because they like it, they believe in it. Not to shake the money tree.
It’s an interesting take though because a lot of good content requires funding too, as well as hosting etc.
So how can we solve that in a reasonable way that doesn’t lead to all the bullshit?
My take is that hosting is no longer expensive, I have a 30€/month fiber link with 700Mb/s up and could theoretically host my videos for hundreds or even thousands of interested people. At 40€ I can have a 10Gb/s up if needed. That’s a lot of videos served daily.
Now, I also think that the monymaker needing to serve millions of people can go and do that elsewhere.
So what’s missing is a sort of search engine so that when I want to check out fly fishing or knitting I can check out the exquisite videos from the respective community.
Something along those lines.
If people are interested I’ll host their videos, and it shouldn’t be that hard to make them searchable, but for sure, I can’t do it all by myself. What do you think?
That’s the issue. If we’re gonna get evil tech bros out of our human interactions, we need to build a platform that doesn’t reject people who like to eat.
Journalists need to get access to sources, and want to see when events are happening.
Documentary creators want a way to create interesting and useful videos that will earn them a living.
Streamers want a platform that can serve a bunch of users with near-realtime (okay, just fast) interactions.
That’s what OP’s link is missing: being able to use a platform to do your preferred job is one of the things that makes a platform compelling. Until we have that, we’re rejecting a big part of our audience.
You are right of course, I just think it might be easier to start small. Starting small means we already have the bandwidth to do so, we just need the software.
I’m working on the tenfingers sharing protocol which could be used to kickstart a more anonymous decentralised web.
We wanna grow too and hopefully be a place with more authentic conversations (better anti-bot defenses) - hyperbolic to say “future’s at stake”?
I think truly delightfully UX would be very yuge. I should learn and contribute :)