this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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The situation there was inevitable, and pretty well follows what any onling aggreagate service does. The onld expression of 'if the service is free, you are the product' is a given in the online space when speaking in the context of a commercial organization. No entry fee means somone is supporting that infrastructure on your behalf at their own cost. Some try ads, they get blocked by the user. Some collect data for sale to marketing or stats agencies. The bills need to be paid somwhere.
The only real alternatives are either large services funded by an endowment or other wealthy pary willing to foot the bill for no compensation, or things like the fediverse where several small services are voluntarily provided by end users with limited resources.
Scaling all the fedi services will be an eternal challenge. One small node cannot reasonably pull the posts from all others, and any nodes that could take on such a heavy load end up becoming defacto centralized services just as the traditional large sites. This lends itself to a result of walled gardens where content is currated per user or community, not pulling in all dissenting oppinions, likely creating an echo chamber eventually. That last part could be both a blessing amd curse depending on your position though.
In the end, open communication platforms should be treated as what they truly are: infrastructure, that is too important to be managed by corporate hands.
It can be built by competing corps and maintained by competing corps. But management has to be kept in neutral hands (=financed by our taxes and overseen by some rotating government body - but otherwise kept away from corpo and gov influence). So pretty much what should be standard for housing, water, electricity, insurance, banks, health care, mail, landlines, cable and some important media.
Alas, instead all of the above is getting privatized to the max - so it's looking pretty bleak for any major communication platforms.
But a man can dream...
In some parts that's already the case with groups like IANA and ICANN, but that's only going so far as keeping things orderly and functioning. I don't see actual compute able to be any more democratized than it is really though with the advent of cloud hosting providers. It's hard enough maintaing a major infrastructure when it's done with a simple goal of availability much less if it had some sort of equal access mandate like most things done at a national level.