Searching for Digital Independence

You know the internet has reached a breaking point when major news articles are now discussing enshittification and The Dead Internet theory. As someone who remembers as a child when the internet used to scream at you (and you capitalized the letter I), I and many others saw this coming.

The pattern was predictable in many ways. new technology invented, enthusiasts begin to build communities and connections with technology like usenets and forums, then corporations are born who say: “Look! Come be with us, we have the innovation and we can do all the same things. Even better, we'll give it to you for free and do all the hard work.”

Thus, the silos were born and then in a matter of a decade, those people who joined the silos became food for the ads and now artificial intelligence.

I think it all came to a head when Elon Musk bought Twitter and destroyed it from the inside out. So many people had sworn Twitter was too strong, too important as a central source to be brought down by one man.

Boy where they wrong. It is anecdotal but I remember when everything circulated around twitter. If you wanted to advertise your book, you went to twitter. If you want to hang out with other authors, you went to twiiter. If you wanted to know anything and everything that was going on, you went to twitter.

Twittter was a constant part of your life if you had a presence online and there was always something new or interesting going on. You couldn't go a day without thinking about it or micro-blogging something to share with your author friends.

Now? I haven't had an account since April of 2022, there is no one there I know anymore, and the last time I stuck my head in, all out found was random complaints, racist trolls, and a bunch of ads for fake gotcha games.

This isn't unique to Twitter. Google started it when they removed “Don't be evil” from their Code of Conduct in 2018. It was the Reddit Apocalypse when Steve Huffman decided that Reddit being a public company on the backs of unpaid moderators was the way to go and then crushed the mod and user revolt so efficiently that would have made autocrats proud. Now Matt Mullenwig, CEO of Tumblr, and WordPress' parent Company Automattic, is going of his way attacking a trans user and prepping the sale of all user data on both platforms to be sold to Midjourney and OpenAI.

These are just a few of the major incidents that have turned the once green grass silos into hell holes where the users are kept making content for free that companies can sell.

There is a growing trend online from what I can see of people wanting their internet and digital lives back. They want freedom from the system that's enslaved them.

Freedom is Difficult

For many seeking freedom, it's a challenge because companies have made it so easy to find content and get things curated that users struggle to understand how to do that now. If you go through a lot of articles on Mastodon and decentralized social media when Twitter collapsed and burned, people were confused on what to do and no matter how simple people try to make it, nobody can grasp it.

If it's not the concept of federation, it's the whole curating their own experience and the fact that they must participate instead of just sitting there and watching what comes in.

The users see the word social media and see social MEDIA when it is more correctly SOCIAL media. I'm not saying that we must give up on these people or that they are beyond hope. The internet is owned by all, and they deserve their digital freedom too. What I am confident we have to do as a community on the fediverse is try and find ways to meet them in the middle and help them de-program them and get their freedom back.

What are the Steps?

I don't have the answers to everything nor am I stating that I do. I'm not a snake oil salesman writing this up, so people think I have the answers. I don't. But what we need to start providing to those is:

If we don't make this more approachable, then we will never expand in any meaningful way.

— Jonathan S.