I'm 34 and this is deep
AVeryCleverName
joined 2 years ago
I'm just beginning my de-googling journey. However when I think about the potential loss of convenience this is what I tell myself: in exchange for convenience, particularly since the dawn of the smartphone era, we have lost a deeper understanding of how things work under the hood. And how much convenience have we really gained? I think it is more likely we have been led to believe our convenience has been increased when really the only convenience that matters is how convenient it is to advertise to us.
Who has read The Master Switch by Tim Wu? It's a great book and that essentially argues every mass communication medium started off as a decentralized playground for hobbyists before consolidating into a centralized profit seeking (or profit-seeking-enabling) entity. It the ends with the question of whether the same destiny awaits the internet.
I remember hoping it didn't, and that hope grows harder to maintain by the day. It's so fucking sad.
I just hope that even if this standard is implemented, the protocol maintains enough of it's flexibility for small enclaves of people who still believe in the technology's original vision to "opt out" of it.
My first thought as well. It may seem like a pedantic "well akshually" thing, but the world wide web and the internet are not the same thing.
Boo. This seems like the first step toward eventually locking down "side loading" like iOS does.
I sort by new. It seems to work. There's a severe lack of comments, which I am trying to do my part to rectify.
All that is solid melts into air
Please share your ad blocking strategy when you do!
I never used bare DOS, my first experience with a PC was on windows 3.1
I think about this a lot. I'm so grateful I had the experience of messing with the windows registry and other phenomena of the 90s.
I think it might be a bit of an xy problem. I myself have hoped for the runaway success of the fediverse. But I realized it's not actually some absolute number of users I want. What I want is for the fediverse to have that same "there's a community for anything" that reddit had.
I'm starting to hope the fediverse doesn't get too big now, honestly. There's a certain number of eyeballs that is going to attract people interested in exploiting those eyeballs, and I don't know if the fediverse is robust enough to fight them off as the pot of gold they see begins to overflow. It's hard balance to find. And maybe the decentralized aspect of the fediverse does mean that it can't be fully assimilated by capital, I don't know.
Were living in interesting times.
I think we're just as bored. We may in fact be worse off for having increased our "interest threshold" such that we must seek more and more stimuli in order to stave off boredom.
Doomscrolling is the new boredom.