Well, we let it get this way. We’re at a point where any practical outlet for speech online is a small set of USA-based tech giant. https://t.co/nDREV1j4YH
— Rahul Gaitonde (@RahulGaitonde) January 10, 2021
We ignored making it easy to self-host one’s soapbox. Setting up a domain, hosting and WordPress install is not much easier than ten years ago. And ways to discover such decentralised speech is still nonexistent.
— Rahul Gaitonde (@RahulGaitonde) January 10, 2021
I’ve heard people reminisce about the openness and diversity of the pre-tech giant era. Well – there wasn’t one. Ten, twelve years ago, the most popular RSS reader was Google Reader, and most blogs were https://t.co/02D1afFF6s ones.
— Rahul Gaitonde (@RahulGaitonde) January 10, 2021
I’ve heard people reminisce about the openness and diversity of the pre-tech giant era. Well – there wasn’t one. Ten, twelve years ago, the most popular RSS reader was Google Reader, and most blogs were https://t.co/02D1afFF6s ones.
— Rahul Gaitonde (@RahulGaitonde) January 10, 2021
And ten years before *that*, Usenet and IRC servers existed, but the internet was tiny at that point. The vast, vast majority of people online today have only ever known USA tech-giant pub-sub platforms.
— Rahul Gaitonde (@RahulGaitonde) January 10, 2021
But that they together effectively control speech online is as much the failure of the millions-strong tech community as it is the platforms’ admittedly astonishing success.
— Rahul Gaitonde (@RahulGaitonde) January 10, 2021
I’d like the conversion to be less about whether TW/FB/app store duopoly were right re: Trump/Parler and the rest, and more about how we got to this degree of centralisation, and how we can radically better incentivise independently-owned publishing & discovery.
— Rahul Gaitonde (@RahulGaitonde) January 10, 2021
Endnote: a platform-independent fringe community brings with it its own danger, which I wrote about yesterday, but the alternative is to let a handful of American individuals decide what can or cannot be said across the web. https://t.co/ClZr602zt1
— Rahul Gaitonde (@RahulGaitonde) January 10, 2021