Electronic Frontier Foundation shouted out Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon in their Reddit coverage today: What Reddit Got Wrong
From the article:
"Moving to the Fediverse
This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon."
I think it is more like the protoweb. How this works is more similar to BBSes, Usenet, IRC networks and the like from 30 years ago. Truly distributed networks with no central controlling mechanism and the systems communicate by simply agreeing on the technical protocol. That was what the internet was designed for i the first place. The last couple of decades where everything has been centralized to a few big megacorps is an abomination.
Everything old is new again. Time is a flat circle.
Since the fediverse unlike the rest of the web consists mostly of people hostile to aggressive monetisation there’s a built-in limit to how ‘capitalist’ (in the popular sense rather than the technical sense) an instance can be in terms of funding it. Instances will be forced to find alternative ways to pay the bills to the traditional ‘our users are the commodity we sell’ approach of the corporate social media platforms if they want to stick around for the long run which will be a fantastic thing for the web I think.
"History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes" -Mark Twain
It definitely feels like a throw back to before we had these massive centralized 'social networks'.
Reddit will live on, but I think we'll see a shift to the fediverse. It's the best of both worlds. Smaller communities but with that big network feel if you want. Activity pub is great.