People talk about a "decentralized Internet" and immediately start talking about pie-in-the-sky solutions: Web3, Gopher, private Discords, etc. We already had

People talk about a "decentralized Internet" and immediately start talking about pie-in-the-sky solutions: Web3, Gopher, private Discords, etc. We already had a successful era of decentralization with vBulletin and PHPbb boards in the 2000s. Reddit and Facebook Pages took over that niche, and started pulling up the ladder behind them by de-emphasizing posts that linked out to a third party site. The message was clear: got something to post? Post it on the site directly, don't link. Their advertising business relies on people spending as much time as possible on [myPlatform], as opposed to [yourSite]. Heck, even that famous article about "dead Internet" has its source in a forum topic, not a viral tweet. Because it's a forum post, it's not arbitrarily limited to 280 characters, there's actually room for nuance, both in the OP and the replies to it. https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/ https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...