It feels like the web is becoming more closed every year — fewer open forums, more platforms locking away data and communities behind logins. What do you think are the biggest forces driving the decline of the open internet? Are walled gardens like Discord the main problem, or is it something else like artificial intelligence, corporate consolidation, surveillance, or changing user habits?
Corporate consolidation is the end goal and all of the others are part of the toolkit for accomplishing that. (You can use those tools for other things, but a hammer with blood on it is a murder weapon no matter how many nails are in it’s past or future)
I think that we need more hybrid online/irl communities. Half of these issues at least can be avoided by treating digital spaces as the temporary fever dreams they are.