The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations.
The commons built in the 90s was turned into a playground in the 2000s and is now a oil well being mined by megacorps.
What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's ability to profit from this was a disguise created by free money.
With any luck twitter/reddit/facebook/et al. will disappear in favour of their "corresponding wikipedias" --- which is the model, I think, all the "platform creators" thought they were participating in.
There needs to be new alliances between volunteer-platform-creators and volunteer-content-creators
I can't agree with this enough. The internet today is a cesspit, it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums. I made a lot of real life friends from the forums I frequented.
Oh the good old days :(
That's the thing I'm looking forward to with the evolution of the "Fediverse" and other efforts toward federation/decentralization. The problem with traditional forums was that they were all little silos disconnected from one another; now those forums can talk to each other via ActivityPub or what have you, offering a nicer balance between "isolated but tight-knit community" v. "expansive but highly-impersonal masses".
Are there traditional forums/bulletin boards with Fediverse interop? The Fediverse platforms I'm aware of seem to all be focusing on cloning the existing UX of big walled-garden sites, which seems like a dubious approach. We know that forums/BB's can work quite well, so why not bring that UX back with "federation" (i.e. interacting with outside users and service instances) as a pure added feature?