In the end I don’t think internet users in rich powerful countries are the users most likely to benefit and invest their time into in the fediverse. They might be the ones with the most free time, money and privilege around computers which makes being on the leading edge of niche technologies far easier, but I don’t think using the fediverse vs commercial social media is thattt crucial of a difference for most (add a million qualifiers here except if you are black, queer, trans etc… I am talking in relative terms here) livimg inside the borders of colonial powers like the US, France, Germany etc..
Speaking as a hetero white dude who grew up with a decent amount of privilege the fediverse isn’t for the countless versions of me living within the borders of colonial powers…
It might have been programmers living within the borders of colonial powers that did most of the labor to create the fediverse, and most of the early users might have come from within colonial powers but I think it is important to recognize that the gift that the fediverse represents to the world is the capacity to empower people living outside the borders of colonial powers to own and run their own social networks instead of having some random Facebook employee who doesn’t have the time or basic knowledge of a country to make major decisions about what news accounts to moderate as dangerous spam and what to allow.
From a 30,000 foot view, speaking in broad terms and specific values and priorities, what do you think are the best strategies for flipping the script on the fediverse being mostly a tool used by people within the borders of colonial powers to one used by without and within?
I wonder about the capacities of fediverse software being useful as a compliment to HOT open street mapping type initiatives in the wake of disasters and just in general?
(Are server costs just generally cheaper/easier in colonial countries to run or is it purely a money and time thing? I don’t really know)
What I find quite annoying is how people created these monopolies.
50 years ago, there were 3 (arguably 4) American car companies—still a de facto oligopoly, but 3 is better than 1. The Japanese and VW added to it.
Today we essentially have one search portal, Google; one social network site, Facebook; one video-hosting site, YouTube; and one micro-blogging site, Twitter/X.
If people spent perhaps 1/10th of their micro-blogging time on other sites, Twitter might not have been as attractive to Musk and his backers, but they chose ease over choice, and now they're wailing over what he's doing with it.
I'm off-topic.
I mostly agree with your statement. Maybe Amazon likes the internet, but probably most others in big business in the US don't: it might account a bit for the shitty websites of many of them.
There are obviously a million reasons for this, greed and corruption being obvious touchstones but I also think culturally we weren't raised to think this state of affairs was grotesque.
A lot just comes down to how people perceive the fediverse, is it just an alternative, another tool you can use that works just as well as corporate social media (lots of handwaving here) or is it a niche community for specific subsections of tech-ish nerds that becomes successfully codified as a tertiary, unimportant place by pop culture?