3 ms·

the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. How "open" were those blogs and forums, though in a functional sense? Instead of a

the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. How "open" were those blogs and forums, though in a functional sense? Instead of an untrustworthy/unreliable corporation like Twitter or Reddit owning a data and community.... we used to have a zillion untrustworthy/unreliable individual "webmasters" owning those blogs and forums. "Your" "community" might be gone in the blink of an eye because the guy running it threw a hissy fit, or forgot to pay his hosting bill. All other things being equal, the current near-monoculture does suck worse. But the old days sort of sucked too.

xctr94 3y ago
Valid point, but only partially true. It was remarkably easy to simply take a database dump and clone the server. Or pay the bill again. Or have multiple billing admins. There’s a very good number of forums still alive, proving they have some resilience to show for themselves. It’s also a form of distributed resilience, i.e. one forum going down isn’t as bad as all of Reddit. Eh…
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  It was remarkably easy to simply take a database dump and clone the server Huh? I'm not following. That helps the admin(s) and nobody else. The other 99.99% of users are in functionally the same predicament as Reddit users: they have zero control over the data. Theoretically a forum admin could make those dumps publicly available, I guess? I'm sure that has happened once or twice, but I've never heard of anybody doing that.
notacoward 3y ago
> we used to have a zillion untrustworthy/unreliable individual "webmasters" owning those blogs True enough, but the chance of many blog/forum owners all having a hissy fit at the same time - the equivalent of what has happened to Twitter with Musk or Reddit with Huffman - was infinitesimal. Also, because there were many, competition worked. Don't like one forum? Go to another, often on the same topic, and losing all the friends you knew on other forums was never even a possibility. Thanks to network effects, that hasn't been the case with the every-topic megasites. Returning to a more decentralized model won't solve everything, and will even (re)introduce a few other problems, but it's still more resilient especially with regard to crazy CEOs.

xctr94 3y ago

Valid point, but only partially true. It was remarkably easy to simply take a database dump and clone the server. Or pay the bill again. Or have multiple billing admins. There’s a very good number of forums still alive, proving they have some resilience to show for themselves. It’s also a form of distributed resilience, i.e. one forum going down isn’t as bad as all of Reddit. Eh…

JohnBooty 3y ago
It was remarkably easy to simply take a database dump and clone the server Huh? I'm not following. That helps the admin(s) and nobody else. The other 99.99% of users are in functionally the same predicament as Reddit users: they have zero control over the data. Theoretically a forum admin could make those dumps publicly available, I guess? I'm sure that has happened once or twice, but I've never heard of anybody doing that.

notacoward 3y ago

> we used to have a zillion untrustworthy/unreliable individual "webmasters" owning those blogs True enough, but the chance of many blog/forum owners all having a hissy fit at the same time - the equivalent of what has happened to Twitter with Musk or Reddit with Huffman - was infinitesimal. Also, because there were many, competition worked. Don't like one forum? Go to another, often on the same topic, and losing all the friends you knew on other forums was never even a possibility. Thanks to network effects, that hasn't been the case with the every-topic megasites. Returning to a more decentralized model won't solve everything, and will even (re)introduce a few other problems, but it's still more resilient especially with regard to crazy CEOs.