I’m honestly very excited about Lemmy and Mastodon.

With federated and decentralized technology, I think there’s a real hope of taking the internet back from the tiny selection of corporatized, monetized, sterile silos we have now, where everyone is forced to abide by the same compromise rules and everything can be co-opted or changed at a moment’s notice without the userbase’s consent, and giving it to smaller, more fun, radical, unique, and interesting internet communities, run by volunteers who really care, for like minded people.

I think it will lead to a much more diverse and richly textured internet, maybe even a more human internet, since each place you go will be a smaller, more intentional community which policies itself and can develop its own interesting culture and set of norms, while still being connected to everything else so the rot of pure isolation doesn’t set in.

Technology — especially how it is structured — is never neutral, and I think for the first time in a long while, we’ve stumbled on technologies in federation and decentralization that actually tend towards good things. The inherent benefits of federation and decentralization to autonomy and resilience and diversity and resistance tocorporatizationn are stunning, and as long as we don’t fuck that up by assuming that those benefits are sufficient, don’t rest on our laurels thinking we don’t need to maintain a culture that is consciously and intentionally oriented around preserving the things we want to see, I think we’ll be okay!