And if not what do you expect/want to replace it with. I dont think the whole web being like the fediverse is feasible,since billions of users use the internet

  • darthelmet@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    You are asking this on a platform specifically filled with people who didn’t want to be on those centralized services. :P

    That said, not to be the contrarian, but I think this is one of a collection of issues where the problem is not the technology or organizational structure, it’s just capitalism. Generalizing to talk about any monopolies, there are a lot of benefits to centralized production. Economies of scale, not duplicating work/resources, etc. There is a reason why some industries, called natural monopolies, are either run by the government or a private corporation is granted a monopoly over it in a regulated way. The classic example of this is infrastructure like train tracks. You don’t need 5 different train lines going to all the same places and there’s no space for that anyway. So by having one entity run the trains, you get to avoid the problems with that.

    Going back to the internet: Centralization has some of the usual benefits of a more general monopoly: If we have one social media site, we don’t need 30 different shitty versions of a video player when the first one worked just fine. But more specifically, it has network effects: The more people who use a site, the more valuable it is for everyone else to use the site. If I go to a site to chat with people and there’s nobody to chat with, there’s not much point in being there. There is a consistent UI so I don’t need to relearn how to navigate different sites. Plus it makes it easier to find what I’m looking for or discover new things.

    None of what I described above is directly caused by greedy corporations. Those are just the dynamics that emerge from the material reality of the internet. If we go rid of corporations tomorrow, I think we’d still end up with a decent amount of centralization because of that. Like imagine all of the big social media sites dissipated tomorrow. Everything goes back to being individual sites with their own forums. What happens? I go to a site that has no users, realize it’s dead, and go back to the more populous one. Or perhaps in an effort to make it easier to find everything someone makes a site that links to all the other interesting sites, curated of course because a list of literally everything on the internet wouldn’t be useful. Maybe you add a forum to that site so people could talk about their favorite other sites in one place. The smaller sites where less conversation happens dry up and the big ones snowball until they’re so big that they’re the place to be. Oops we just reinvented Reddit. As much as I’m done with dealing with corporate social media and want to stick with the fediverse or other stuff, it is still just the case that these sites have less people, and therefore less stuff to do, than those bigger sites, so they lack some of the value I got from those. I’m stubborn enough to put up with that out of principle, but for a lot of people, they’re just going to see that they can’t find anyone to talk about their niche hobby they had a subreddit for or whatever and just move on. It’s hard to achieve escape velocity.

    THE problem then, is that these sites are controlled by corporations with profit motives. Their goal isn’t to create the best user experience, it’s just to do whatever makes them the most money. If that means psychologically manipulating people to engage more they’ll do that. If that means censoring speech that scares off advertisers, they’ll do that. If it means making the site worse and then selling people the solution, they’ll do that. If it means abusing their position of power to take advantage of creators on these sites who depend on the site, they’ll do that. And because of this centralized position of power with all of it’s inherent monopolistic advantages, they get away with this. Wrest control away from those corporations and find a way to run these centralized sites with democratic control, and most of those problems go away and we get to keep the benefits.

    It’s not obvious that there is a good way to achieve this under capitalism though. The fediverse is certainly an interesting experiment in this by allowing there to essentially be independent sites that get collated into one place with a unified standard for UX, but we’ll have to see if they can overcome inertia to reach the critical mass necessary to be a genuine replacement to centralized corporate controlled sites. I also don’t know enough about the technology to know if this is the best solution or not. So I’d be curious to see if this takes off or if people find another solution.