> Discourse is the 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet
Are you thinking of Discord?
How would smaller companies do better?
For every gmail, how many independent email providers do you think exist out there?
Why would you choose to not pay for the big tech products and then pay for a smaller version?
Smaller companies and ISVs, on the other hand, will be better off if their market is commoditized. They won't have to spend so much to compete in R&D, they just need to find each the best way to serve their (comparatively) small customer base.
If https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_international_trad... is right, the necessary technology for international trade was not available before 4000 BCE (horse riding ~3700 BCE, long-distance sea travel ~2000 BCE).
One is that centralized _business_ has certainly not been the primary organizational mode. You can talk about centralized _government_ (of whatever variety you'd like), but the distinction there is that the centralized government had some sense of itself in an ecosystem - a citizenry, a land, a future, etc. - and businesses do not.
The second is that centralized entities sure wrote a bunch of stuff _down_, but it's hard to say they were the primary organizational mode for any but the last 50-200 years - the reach of serious centralized bureaucracies has only really begun to match their propaganda in the industrial and now computer age. Until extremely recently, the actual effective reach of a centralized bureaucracy was a day's horseback ride - control degrades rapidly as one leaves the core. "Heaven is high and the emperor is far away", as the saying goes.
Edit: With regards to the second note, "Against the Grain" by James C. Scott is a solid read.
If you own a company and want it to last through the ages and you aren't literally the only guy in town, never become number one. Aim high, but don't hit the top.
The same can be said for countries and practically any organization or group. You stay an underdog if you do not want to ever fail.
That leads to complacency, corruption, and delusion, ultimately leading to failure.
Everyone and everything from mundane individuals to megacorporations and empires have all fallen from grace once they became top dog. No exceptions.
If you want to last, aim high but don't become top dog.
For most of human history, most businesses were small ma and pa shops operated by a few local people. These days large business chains are the norm. You could say that centralized big business killed the decentralized small ma and pa shops.
I suspect that was the intent.
I suspect the later. We’ve seen billionaires do it countless times.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
I used the 'redirect to nitter' Firefox extension and Android app but it got quite unreliable and nobody else that I know uses nitter at all. I think Nitter users would be a tiny, perhaps even immeasurable minority compared to casual readers that now are incentivized to either log in or fuck off (but... FOMO).
Of anything I suspect Elon saw what happened woth reddit and had a "wait, we should do that!" Moment.
A potential saving grace: I bet within a year or so it will be easy to self-host LLMs that are easy to fine tune and run. Then there will be a few open source tools that you can use yourself, privately, to capture your level of interest while reading, and periodically make a reader/summarize/filter agent.
This is not scary if people can fairly easily run it all themselves, keeping their data private. It would help wade through crap, and there is some irony in using LLMs to have personal filtering and summarization.
Compared to future versions of ChatGPT, Bard, etc. the models that individuals can self host will be much weaker, but I think that they will be strong enough for personal agents and eventually be cheap to run, and affordable to fine tune.
The clock is ticking until you’ll need to decide which internet package you prefer, based on content providers and limited by region.
At least Yahoo will probably come free with the base package.
Publicly free content from users devolves to garbage content. I think the Chat GPT effect is they're realizing its easier for companies/entities to generate garbage that is at or exceeding the intelligence of comments by actual people (a low bar). Sure there are pockets of usefulness but this is tiny amongst the firehose of garbage.
If all that is publicly available on social platforms is just garbage nonsense, people will just stop going if any barrier is thrown in front of them. The internet as a technology stack is fine. This is how social media dies (hopefully).
On every large platform, this hasn't been the majority for a long time.
Hah, this might mean that we'd be one step closer to the dead internet (conspiracy) theory actually being reality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
What an interesting concept.
Those sites never fit my definition of open anyway (free, permissively licensed technology and content). The ones that do are smaller, aren't a monoculture and seem to be pretty untroubled so far. No one wants to scrape the little Mastodon or Lemmy instances or other small community sites I pay attention to.
Big deal if something is a threat to the social media business. The social media business is a cancer which should be destroyed anyway. Go outside and engage in real socializing instead of the depression-spawning, teen-girl-murdering version peddled by Zuckerberg and Musk. It's much better and once you change your habits you'll never look back. Maybe it has something to do with all the vitamin D you get from being outside.
We've BEEN through federated platforms before. We've even been through PROTOCOLS before. They're all horrible. The successor to any platform that currently exists will have slight improvements to what already exists, and that's IF they're able to do so.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do have over 30 years of being around social media platforms on the internet.
The internet is fine. The highly centralized businesses that built themselves on the technology are meeting their inevitable end.