A poignant quote here
"It was a disaster so bad that a new word, Waldsterben, or “forest death,” was minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare they were all but dead. "
It’s an interesting, useful analogy. My concern is that, like with nature, many fear the wild. The moment a rewilding of the internet might lead to a negative event, people would run and beg for the reinstament of walled gardens
That’s a good comparison I hadn’t honestly thought of! Thanks
I was really bummed that Filterworld by Kyle Chayka didn’t even mention reddit or lemmy and only barely mentioned Mastodon
The Internet has never been as large and diverse as it is now. In the 2000s Wikipedia was often the only place where you could find generally useful information about the world on the Internet, now everything in it plus many other things can be found on many other websites competing for algorithmic attention.
The real thing about today’s Internet is that on it, censorship happens not by having too little information, but too much, much of which will never be shown to very many people because of the algorithms of search engines or social media recommendation systems. I don’t do a lot of “social media” and always find it weird to hear about personalities there who apparently have thousands or millions of followers but whom I have never heard of before.
I don’t agree that Wikipedia used to be the only place. There were plenty of competing encyclopedias, it was simply the best long-term.
britannica has entered the chat
It’s interesting to see the author mention BlueSky, I think as a potential positive, alongside Mastodon and other federated protocols. Here in the Fediverse I only ever see negative views of it, largely because it doesn’t use Activity Pub but also because it’s coming from a private company. But it sounds like the author thinks we need that diversity?
