The early web might have been eclipsed by the big companies, but don't be fooled by availability bias. How much of the internet is powered by Wordpress.org? Quite a lot to be considered "dead".
How many people still use some kind of RSS Reader? Google killed its offering more for a lack of way to monetization than for a lack of users. (Also, I don't remember people saying "RSS is dead, there is no way to discover who to subscribe to.")
Look at messaging protocols, Matrix also is still small compared to WhatsApp/Messenger/iMessage/Slack/Discord/whatever but their are numbers are growing. Far from dead.
Mastodon is people's living rooms only because the current users are mostly refugees from the centralized platforms, and yes, they are making this mistake of conflating instances with tribes. But this temporary and specific to Mastodon. As more systems start adopting ActivityPub and the more pulverized the user's become, the less this will be an issue.
I mean, a user's identity is @username@domain, and I can follow local or remote users equally easy, and most of the time I don't even notice where they are posting from.
If that's my living room, it sure looks like a living room that's wide open and the size of the planet.
That said, the number of instances that engage in excessive blocking seems to be rather limited. I'm not sure it's such a large problem in practice.
If they aren't the same, that's a bug. The lesson of Facebook et al should be that aggregation and content should be in the same place. People use these sites after a long day of work and don't have the time or energy to plug in other fragmented software to make it work--even technical people. They just want to consume and share content. They would see this fragmented ecosystem vs. the shiny all-in-one network with social proof of all their friends and celebrities.
> But this temporary and specific to Mastodon
It's endemic to all of these alternative platforms because they select for (other than curious technophiles) people who were too extreme for the mainstream platform.
Here's how to solve it and to get what you actually want:
One decentralized global network with self-directed moderation (following/friends). The problem with Facebook et al is not the UX or the quality of implementation. It's that the protocol is owned by one corporation. Why can't you just clone Facebook in every single aspect except the computers it runs on (everyone's rather than Facebook's).
ActivityPub itself is not tied to Mastodon or any federated protocol, all it is concerned about is format of messages and some authentication mechanisms.
Have you really thought this through?
During the 80's and early 90's, there were tens of thousands of BBS systems. Those disappeared with the advent of the Web:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-l...
Most of the dominant platforms today have only existed for less then 20 years. That's... only yesteryear. There's absolutely zero guarantee that they will be around for another 10, 20 or 30 years.
Why? Because it's par for the course for empires to come and go. Ma Bell had an absolute monopoly on a telephone network in the U.S. until they got broken up in 1982. That happened. Few large corporations are over 100 years old, and even so, they aren't the same they were back in the day.
The Internet still consists of the same basic building blocks and technology as it did 10, 20 or 30 years ago. TCP/IP, UDP,... Beyond your wireless access point, it's all just fiber and UTP spanning the globe. Oh, and data centers with racks of computers to linked one another. Beyond computing power and other trappings, it's all conceptually not that different from what it has always been.
I've always found it a strange how we have been myopically staring at FAANG companies in the Valley over the past 20-30 years. You know how that has come to be? Damn excellent marketing on their part. That's all it ever was.We all know it, but we don't really admit to it. And so we laud them as these powers of nature that you can't get around. Even though they are anything but, really.
For all intents and purposes, large swathes of the Internet and the Web are dark, but they are very much there. For instance, there is more then just English in the world. The Web in Asia looks radically different, beyond what Baidu or Alibaba offer.
Sure, the early web has died. But neither do you find 19th century newspapers or obscure popular literature in modern bookstores. You'd got to a library or an archive for those. We have the Internet Archive for good reason.
What hasn't died is the technology and the basic ideas of that era. Those are very much alive in small communities all over the Internet. And that's totally valid and in no way inferior to what large platforms offer.
Yelling that "x has died" and "the problem was solved", well, no, that's a very simplistic take on reality. If something works perfectly for someone, well, why do you forcefully imply that what they want is without value and thus a waste of time? Por que no los dos, right?
As too FAANG, ask yourself this: When they publish reports about their numbers of users, how much of those represent actual use of those platforms? How many accounts are truly dead and unused? How many people are really using Twitter on a daily basis for hours on end and aren't just hopping all over the place? Why would we accept those reports at face value? Because they are valued billions of $?
Remember, it's all about keeping the music playing and the party going. And today's "big instutions" aren't the first DJ's at the decks, nor will they be the last. History always catches up in the end.
And meanwhile, others will always do their own thing, write code, build cool things and invent new ways of communicating.
The early Web didn't die. It evolved into what we have today. And that's the normal way of how things go.
Much like the Roman Empire has kept and still keeps on deeply influencing modern Western culture.
Hence why I disagree with the words "problem" and "solved". That assumes that history has come to an end and the Web will be and forever be like it is now. Stasis. End of story. Which can't be further removed from the truth.
Nobody can predict the future exactly, but what we can be sure of is that nothing is permanent and everything changes, because change is literally what has shaped human history.
The early web died. The problem was solved by killing it and replacing it with big institutions. It got replaced by the superior network effects of Facebook feeds, Reddit feeds, Instagram, Twitter, or the very site you're scrolling through now.
Twitter is the bar or the town square. Mastodon etc. is people's living rooms.