A 1993 Time Magazine article quotes computer scientist John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as saying “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”[7]
That applied a whole lot more when most connections were using a phone line, and a decent size city could have hundreds of ISPs. But part of the design of a redundant mesh network is that there are tons of different paths to any destination. Cutting any of those links would simply force traffic to other routes.
The early Internet was decentralized in other ways, too. Rather than flock to corporate platforms like Facebook, people spent a lot of time on federated and independent platforms. This included Usenet, IRC, and BBSes. In the event that the feds, lawyers, etc could take one down, a dozen more could spring up overnight. There was such a small barrier to entry, and many were run by hobbyists.
It’s somewhat true today. There are countless Lemmy instances that are completely independent. Pirate Bay famously references the Hydra, and it applies to their peers as well. But these are limited in scope.
Xitter has shown us just how quickly and thoroughly a platform can collapse through hostile admins, and how slowly people will reject it.
FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I moan about it regularly but this…
Is just tragic isn’t it? We really had it. A global free flow of hobbies, interests, research, debate, exploration.
I don’t be what’s so fundamentally flawed about human nature that a) something that started so well like Facebook gets enshitified to the extent that it has and b) people flock to it en masse like flies round shit
swordgeek@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
The answer to your second point is simple.
Meta’s properties (FB, Insta) have something that most other social networks are lacking: A network of real-world family and friends.
Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Lemmy, Tiktok, and the rest all tend to have communities built from the platform’s population, based on shared interests. Meanwhile, FB is the platform that you use to connect with your oddball uncle and high school friends from way back. That’s the sunk cost that makes it so much harder to leave than the strangers on reddit who share your love of lime jello.
ShellMonkey@lemmy.socdojo.com 4 days ago
That’s a big part of the appeal of the fediverse for me. Setting up a personal site used to be fairly easy, but was largely isolated and unidirectional. With the AP protocol, and frankly a lot of self-hostable apps in general these days, you can make something to converse with the whole globe and you don’t even need to make a big effort to help people find it.
Webrings still exist, but finding them is less than trivial when they get drowned out by the noise of corporate sites. I’ve used IRC within the last year, but had to look up the proper use of nicserve commands. The old web mentality is still out there, but for the major part people want simplicity. Few want to go through the learning curve to deal with some of the more esoteric parts of it when they can just auth into a site and do a thing.
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 4 days ago
It’s a truism in writing; villains act and heroes react. If someone looks at the internet and sees a way to exploit it they will. They don’t care that it’s working fine for everyone else; they want the money.