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They are disillusioned. They watched big tech clobber the internet. They watched network effects cause irreversible centralization. They watched Cambridge An

They are disillusioned. They watched big tech clobber the internet. They watched network effects cause irreversible centralization. They watched Cambridge Analytica and "openness" get abused. They watched toddlers being given iPads to watch YouTube by their parents. They watched kids have mental health issues from online participation. They watched teens start strangling each other after watching porn. They watched robots become 40% of internet traffic, and that was before AI. They watched crypto go from decentralized payments into a get-rich-quick scheme. And they questioned whether it's worth standing behind this.

ToucanLoucan 1y ago
Damn right. I don't hate tech, I fucking love it and I always have. I have a career because of tech. I have tons of friends I met online and continue talking to via tech. I hate tech companies because of what they did to tech.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  But this is where the disillusionment of this idol continues: Do you think kids wouldn't develop the same mental health issues if they were on Mastodon instead of Facebook? Do you think the largest Mastodon instances wouldn't start also harming their users once large enough? There's nothing preventing the decentralized from becoming centralized over time, from the same network effects, and abusing the users all over again. In which case, why fight for it? It's pointless; we started decentralized and became centralized; a re-decentralization moment just causes the same economic forces to pull everything together again.
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    > Do you think kids wouldn't develop the same mental health issues if they were on Mastodon instead of Facebook? I'm not sure, but Facebook has employed too many PhDs to name with the goal of fostering addiction to their product, as well as behavioral ad targeting, and to my knowledge, Mastadon has not. > Do you think the largest Mastodon instances wouldn't start also harming their users once large enough? I don't think user harm is correlated with size of the platform. > There's nothing preventing the decentralized from becoming centralized over time, from the same network effects, and abusing the users all over again. Which is why I support things like the AT Protocol, which enable decentralized social networks that can share data amongst each other, and permit users greater control over what they see and from where. > In which case, why fight for it? Because I've been fighting for a better internet for decades at this point and see nothing better to do with that time were I to stop.
  - snerbles 1y ago
    > In which case, why fight for it? Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Among other things left unsaid.
  - at-fates-hands 1y ago
    >> In which case, why fight for it? It's pointless. I fought for years and came to the same conclusion. I just focus on myself now and a few tight knit circles of friends. We still hang out together on Diaspora. We still muck and hack around with stuff like Ubuntu Touch and debate the latest Linux distros and see how long we can go without our smartphones. A few of my friends have gone "analog" because of what's happened. They were there during the first dot com bust. They've seen what the internet and tech have become - they just want to opt out now. Kind of crazy the times we're living in. Decentralization was the dream - now its just a nightmare a lot of us no longer what to be apart of.
- azemetre 1y ago
  We need more democratic institutions revolving around tech, too many rich individuals have an extreme amount of control in what technology gets pursued and pushed.
kouru225 1y ago
Hey wait a minute what’s so bad about a little strangling? One of these things is not like the other
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  Because according to UK research, just doing it once, in a supposedly safe way, causes biomarkers indicating brain damage in the blood. It can also apparently cause strokes decades afterwards. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40062485/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40062485/ https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jul/07/no-safe-way-risks-of-choking-during-sex https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jul/07/no-safe... “There’s no safe way to do it, no safe quantity of blood or oxygen you can cut off from her brain for fun,” says Jane Meyrick, a chartered health psychologist who leads work on sexual health at the University of the West of England. She describes being at a sexual health conference last year where data was presented on sexual strangulation – the prevalence and harms. “Usually, at those conferences, people will be talking about the extremes of what everyone is getting up to in a very sex-positive way,” she says. “When this was presented, you could feel the tension, the internal conflict, in the room, with professionals being unable to reconcile the gap between what they were hearing and their usual sex-positivity.”
  - password4321 1y ago
    Dang someone had that response locked and loaded, 2 minutes later... in any case I did not expect this entire sub-thread under a discussion on decentralized web!
    - gjsman-1000 1y ago
      If you’re going to insinuate on Hacker News, that pornography is inspiring behaviors that are literally killing people… you need to bring receipts. Being in denial of harm is the favorite pastime here, but that's just the first stage of grief. Case in point, the sex-positive educators in the UK... forced to say that certain bedroom behaviors actually are too dangerous to participate in. Even that, yes, we will control what you do in the bedroom, with the force of law, and even restrict depicting that act regardless of consent, with the force of law. Extremely ironic that sex-positive educators are now forced to say what you can do in the bedroom, after they said "who are you to tell consenting adults what they can do" for decades. > This is the first comment I've seen from you that leverages the UK's authority on anything related to online safety. Edit for a (now deleted) reply: This has nothing to do with the UK; studies objectively say this activity is more dangerous than waterboarding. If that is true, action is objectively necessary, including against depictions.
snerbles 1y ago
For us who remember the 20th Century? Yes, I agree and we can see the causes. For the next generation? It's more that they're wrapped up in centralized closed platforms for their hobbies. Most of them never considered anything else. They were born deep underwater and have no idea why they can't breathe. We had BBSes, forums and IRC. Now it's Discord. We had LAN parties. Now it's publisher-controlled match lobbies. We had RSS feeds. Now it's curated social algos. We had myriad self-hosted wikis and homespun fansites. Now it's all ad-choked Fandom. So on and so forth.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  For Discord and maybe some others, I wonder if it’s just a packaging and marketing problem that just hasn’t been solved. Yes there’s Matrix, but it’s not packaged in a way that makes hosting a node accessible and the way it’s marketed, there’s no clear benefit to typical users. Imagine if instead, the client and server were one in the same and starting a server is as simple as running the client and clicking “new server”, with the software figuring the rest out. Then, on the marketing side you can sell it as a way to get features that Discord puts behind a paywall for free. There’s no way that wouldn’t have a dramatic impact on take-up.
  - Flere-Imsaho 1y ago
    Definitely agree. Take a look at the number of Matrix clients: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ The world doesn't need that many clients, it needs 1 or 2 really good ones that are well polished, supported and marketed. This is a problem in other open-source ecosystems. Eg. We don't need more web browsers, we need Firefox to focus on being a great web browser.
    - Arathorn 1y ago
      This feels very strange: the clients on that page span a huge range of maturity and capability. If you put every email client or every web browser on a single page you’d get a crazy mix too - does that mean that email & the web have failed? Just the opposite, surely. If you want to narrow it down to one or two really great ones which are well polished, supported and marketed just pick Element X, Beeper or maybe Fluffychat?
fidotron 1y ago
I think this ignores an important point: many of them participated in this process. A lot of those idealists turned out to prefer money.

ToucanLoucan 1y ago

Damn right. I don't hate tech, I fucking love it and I always have. I have a career because of tech. I have tons of friends I met online and continue talking to via tech. I hate tech companies because of what they did to tech.

gjsman-1000 1y ago
But this is where the disillusionment of this idol continues: Do you think kids wouldn't develop the same mental health issues if they were on Mastodon instead of Facebook? Do you think the largest Mastodon instances wouldn't start also harming their users once large enough? There's nothing preventing the decentralized from becoming centralized over time, from the same network effects, and abusing the users all over again. In which case, why fight for it? It's pointless; we started decentralized and became centralized; a re-decentralization moment just causes the same economic forces to pull everything together again.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  > Do you think kids wouldn't develop the same mental health issues if they were on Mastodon instead of Facebook? I'm not sure, but Facebook has employed too many PhDs to name with the goal of fostering addiction to their product, as well as behavioral ad targeting, and to my knowledge, Mastadon has not. > Do you think the largest Mastodon instances wouldn't start also harming their users once large enough? I don't think user harm is correlated with size of the platform. > There's nothing preventing the decentralized from becoming centralized over time, from the same network effects, and abusing the users all over again. Which is why I support things like the AT Protocol, which enable decentralized social networks that can share data amongst each other, and permit users greater control over what they see and from where. > In which case, why fight for it? Because I've been fighting for a better internet for decades at this point and see nothing better to do with that time were I to stop.
- snerbles 1y ago
  > In which case, why fight for it? Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Among other things left unsaid.
- at-fates-hands 1y ago
  >> In which case, why fight for it? It's pointless. I fought for years and came to the same conclusion. I just focus on myself now and a few tight knit circles of friends. We still hang out together on Diaspora. We still muck and hack around with stuff like Ubuntu Touch and debate the latest Linux distros and see how long we can go without our smartphones. A few of my friends have gone "analog" because of what's happened. They were there during the first dot com bust. They've seen what the internet and tech have become - they just want to opt out now. Kind of crazy the times we're living in. Decentralization was the dream - now its just a nightmare a lot of us no longer what to be apart of.
azemetre 1y ago
We need more democratic institutions revolving around tech, too many rich individuals have an extreme amount of control in what technology gets pursued and pushed.

kouru225 1y ago

Hey wait a minute what’s so bad about a little strangling? One of these things is not like the other

gjsman-1000 1y ago
Because according to UK research, just doing it once, in a supposedly safe way, causes biomarkers indicating brain damage in the blood. It can also apparently cause strokes decades afterwards. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40062485/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40062485/ https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jul/07/no-safe-way-risks-of-choking-during-sex https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jul/07/no-safe... “There’s no safe way to do it, no safe quantity of blood or oxygen you can cut off from her brain for fun,” says Jane Meyrick, a chartered health psychologist who leads work on sexual health at the University of the West of England. She describes being at a sexual health conference last year where data was presented on sexual strangulation – the prevalence and harms. “Usually, at those conferences, people will be talking about the extremes of what everyone is getting up to in a very sex-positive way,” she says. “When this was presented, you could feel the tension, the internal conflict, in the room, with professionals being unable to reconcile the gap between what they were hearing and their usual sex-positivity.”
- password4321 1y ago
  Dang someone had that response locked and loaded, 2 minutes later... in any case I did not expect this entire sub-thread under a discussion on decentralized web!
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    If you’re going to insinuate on Hacker News, that pornography is inspiring behaviors that are literally killing people… you need to bring receipts. Being in denial of harm is the favorite pastime here, but that's just the first stage of grief. Case in point, the sex-positive educators in the UK... forced to say that certain bedroom behaviors actually are too dangerous to participate in. Even that, yes, we will control what you do in the bedroom, with the force of law, and even restrict depicting that act regardless of consent, with the force of law. Extremely ironic that sex-positive educators are now forced to say what you can do in the bedroom, after they said "who are you to tell consenting adults what they can do" for decades. > This is the first comment I've seen from you that leverages the UK's authority on anything related to online safety. Edit for a (now deleted) reply: This has nothing to do with the UK; studies objectively say this activity is more dangerous than waterboarding. If that is true, action is objectively necessary, including against depictions.

snerbles 1y ago

For us who remember the 20th Century? Yes, I agree and we can see the causes. For the next generation? It's more that they're wrapped up in centralized closed platforms for their hobbies. Most of them never considered anything else. They were born deep underwater and have no idea why they can't breathe. We had BBSes, forums and IRC. Now it's Discord. We had LAN parties. Now it's publisher-controlled match lobbies. We had RSS feeds. Now it's curated social algos. We had myriad self-hosted wikis and homespun fansites. Now it's all ad-choked Fandom. So on and so forth.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
For Discord and maybe some others, I wonder if it’s just a packaging and marketing problem that just hasn’t been solved. Yes there’s Matrix, but it’s not packaged in a way that makes hosting a node accessible and the way it’s marketed, there’s no clear benefit to typical users. Imagine if instead, the client and server were one in the same and starting a server is as simple as running the client and clicking “new server”, with the software figuring the rest out. Then, on the marketing side you can sell it as a way to get features that Discord puts behind a paywall for free. There’s no way that wouldn’t have a dramatic impact on take-up.
- Flere-Imsaho 1y ago
  Definitely agree. Take a look at the number of Matrix clients: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ The world doesn't need that many clients, it needs 1 or 2 really good ones that are well polished, supported and marketed. This is a problem in other open-source ecosystems. Eg. We don't need more web browsers, we need Firefox to focus on being a great web browser.
  - Arathorn 1y ago
    This feels very strange: the clients on that page span a huge range of maturity and capability. If you put every email client or every web browser on a single page you’d get a crazy mix too - does that mean that email & the web have failed? Just the opposite, surely. If you want to narrow it down to one or two really great ones which are well polished, supported and marketed just pick Element X, Beeper or maybe Fluffychat?

fidotron 1y ago

I think this ignores an important point: many of them participated in this process. A lot of those idealists turned out to prefer money.