Yeah, let's repeat twitter, but with an even less controlled messaging system. That'll go well.
I never understood it myself, was never active on anything but IRC. But ActivityPub seems truly magic when it comes to promoting communication across boundaries such as corporations and software stacks, so I jumped on it back in 2017 and loved seeing it blow up in 2022.
There are clearly a lot of very nice, and very normal, people on there who just love the concept of microblogging. Who am I, or you, to stand in their way? And why should they depend on one corporation to communicate when they can take it into their own hands?
It's really a very natural progression, just like we have many ISPs, phone companies, or anything else in society.
Because many are not nice and the platforms clearly have been abused, drive division in society and are bad for mental health. That's why we can't have nice things.
But at the same time I just learned of a protest here in my town, via social media. So it's also helping people organize IRL.
If you see disinformation and find yourself in an echo chamber on a platform where you can chose who you see and engage with, I am afraid it's not the platform's fault.
Another possibility is it'll work out great.
> else they would have already.
Except it doesn't work that way. People are some mixture of dumb, greedy and vain.
> Another possibility is it'll work out great.
What would be the positive outcome? Preferably one that wasn't heralded 20 years ago and has not borne out.
Of course there are and will also be highly negative effects, but the hope is they will be more easily isolated as a result of many cooperatives taking action to exclude those negative effects and their propagaters, rather than rely on policies and practices of a small number of profit-seeking companies.