So, I was kinda idly thinking about how we’re seeing more and more companies such as Reddit give into peer pressure in favor of profit. As their endless stream of investment dollars with the hope of being profitable eventually seems to be running out. How do you see the web moving forward?
Do you think the best way forward, is to go back? I was thinking about it and back in the old days people would have websites that they would host that would make little to no money, they’d just run them for fun, for the passion of it. Do you see these days returning? Lemmy is kind of an example of that, and other federated self-hosted software. It kind of feels like the way things might be headed. People host their own, smaller scale sites, not in pursuit of profits specifically, but for the passion of it.
I honestly think this way of communicating with eachother is more genuine, more real and honestly more optimal. Communications with others shouldn’t entirely hinge upon the will of one soul entity. And while federation definitely has its issues, I personally think it’s vastly better than being ruled by 1 single entity who’s entire goal is to farm as much mindless doomscrolling as possible in pursuit of profits.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against making money off of your work, I think if you spent time working on something you should absolutely make money off of it. However, I don’t think it’s the way our communication should work. For original content such as art, books, movies, shows, games or other similar mediums, I definitely think that the creator is entitled to make money off of that work.
But having our communication fueled by that sort of business model doesn’t make sense to me. It incentives more harsh restrictions on speech and discussion, restricting user speech/expression to what’s “advertiser friendly” and of course, for harvesting and collecting our personal data like we’re some sort of crop or cattle.
Might’ve gone on a bit of a tangent there, but I hope my general point still got across.
I’m totally for a mix of smolweb and distributed services for the future. Being able to throw up my own stuff in a lightweight way, and be “mobile” in the sense I can take my data from place to place instead of it being stuck on Big Tech services is the best for keeping my own sovereignty online, and it’s far closer to the original philosophical ideals of the public internet. I just wish it was easier to maintain a single unique identity that could be shared everywhere, instead of siloed (e.g. different accounts on different fedi instances).
I definitely can see the use of having a single ID that could be shared everywhere, alts are kind of just a thing on fedi, and I can certainly see how it’s not for everyone, I’m one of those people. I have basically 1 main on a few fediverse projects and don’t really deviate from those. I know some people who feels like they have an alt on every instance under the sun, seems exhausting to keep up with. But, if you’re not hosting, your instance, then you kind of have to put a lot of trust that the one who is hosting your instance will remain doing so. Which is a lot of trust to put on someone who isn’t you. I can see how alts can then become almost a requirement in some cases, otherwise if your main instance shuts down, what do you do?
Certainly some things that need to be thought about. I think the fediverse is definitely better than the big tech centralized services, but I definitely don’t think it’s perfect. I wonder what the best solution is/will be. Definitely something fun to think about.
With regard to alts, I think there would (and should!) be room for them where a user desires. There’s a lot of things I’m interested in and am open about with my online persona, but wouldn’t want associated with my work persona. Likewise, I know there are many people out there where keeping a separation between different personas isn’t just a matter of preference, but potentially one of life and death.
As I see it, I’d like to be able to host my own “identity server”, let’s say, which I’d use to identify myself as my public persona to the services I use as that persona, and which would tie all of those services together for me at the identity level. Meanwhile, for things I want to keep separate, I can host additional “identity servers” for other personas, or just create accounts on the different services where I don’t want to have any particular identity tied back to me. I believe that some of the so-called “Web3” stuff has a connection to this, where content is signed and so can all be connected/verified as coming from the same persona, but I never really looked into it as Web3 just feels like a huge (bad) marketing joke to me.
Yes, I didn’t mean phase out alts entirely, I personally would be very upset if I had to use 1 account for everything (huge privacy nightmare). I was thinking about something very similar to what you are proposing here with self-hosted identity servers.