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I would claim the early web diminished primarily because the users left, not because the services died off and left users stranded (though I'll note that a lot of early services--IRC, Usenet, message boards, blogs, etc, are still around, though reduced in size and scope). As for services dying, I picked Google because it was easy. But the graveyard is endless: Myspace, Friendster, and Geocities all spring to mind, just in the social space (and since you don't want to talk about Google, I won't mention Google+ or Orkut). That's not to say the early internet was somehow perfect. My point is simply that a service being commercial offers no guarantee of longevity, and given the need to extract profit or die, with no way for a community to take over an unprofitable service and run it for their own benefit, I'd claim the opposite is true, especially as interest rates have risen and cheap funding has become more scarce, thereby placing a lot more pressure on those services to monetize or die. > and running a modern web application that hosts images, gifs, and videos at scale is obviously a different beast than static html where a marquee tag is as fancy as it gets. Except that's not what a Lemmy or Mastodon instance has to do. A small instance might only need to serve dozens or hundreds of users, and it only needs to host and serve the content they subscribe to. I'll take that over one massive single point of failure. |
I think Usenet and forum numbers probably pale in comparison to Reddit type platforms. Centralization is easier for mass appeal