| I think we're taking the wrong lesson here. Wikipedia is the "Last Good Place" on the internet - it's not decentralized or federated. It is governed by a non-profit and funded by donations. There are good reasons the fediverse hasn't caught on yet and it comes down to user experience. We haven't figured out how to build a federated service that truly coheres as a single platform, network, or community across the whole network. (Yes, individual instances act as coherent communities, but the links to other instances are weak.) And we haven't figured out how to reduce the cognitive load of joining a federated platform to the point where it's accessible to the average user . I think this is a big part of why Mastodon is still touting usage in the single digit millions while Threads and Bluesky grew several orders of magnitude more as Twitter melted down. Until we solve those problems - which by necessity includes solving the discovery problem - we're not going to be able to successfully decentralize the net. Those problems are a huge part of what lead the net to centralize into massive platforms in the first place, and we can't undo it with out resolving those factors. And solving coherence and discovery in federation is a multi-trillion dollar, decades and a research team, Very Hard Problem (tm). ...but we know how to build centralized platforms that are democratically governed by non-profits. Wikipedia showed us how, and there's a lot that could be improved upon to do even better in terms of transparency and governance. And yes, democracy is hard. It just is. Community is hard. Society is hard. It requires deliberation and compromise. And it will never be perfect (as Wikipedia is far from perfect). But it would sure as hell be better than what we've got. The main piece that's missing is startup funding. Non-profit funders mostly don't understand software. We need non-profit funders who are willing to fund the development of platforms until they gain the sorts of critical mass that would allow them to fund their operations through donations. |