| Naive twenty something (back then) here. The latter half of the 1900s changed so drastically that yeah... a Star Trek like utopia seemed plausible, if not inevitable. It wasn't until the post-9/11 mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse. I was honestly surprised (shouldn't have been), and now sorry I didn't do anything to reverse the trend. We need a well-capitalized organization to keep general-purpose computing alive, along with privacy, security, and autonomy. There are lots of little organizations of course, but they are unfocused and operate like ants in a realm dominated by BigTech giants. ----
Reply to below, I can no longer post for the next hour:
---- Right. Unfortunately I don't have the capital, but would love to work on the problem... even for free/cheap in my spare time. And will. For example, been testing the new Starlite tablet with Phosh... and it is soooo close! I'm about to start learning how to develop for it. But it would go faster if say... starlabs, purism, system76, pine, riscv companies, FLOSS peeps would collaborate more effectively. They do to some extent, but don't often push in the same direction. One major problem is the quality of documentation of interfaces. One of those boring things most don't want to do without a paycheck. Despite decades of experience with Linux I don't (yet) know where to start with wayland, dbus, gstreamer, gtk, etc. A book that pulled all this together for developers would be a big enabler. Think it would need to be sponsored as it won't be sustainable on its own. |
I think this doesn't leave enough blame at more technical people embracing the same platforms as normies. After years of bulletin boards and forums where people built up small communities online, everyone migrated to behemoths that actively undercut any chance of that kind of community (examples including Facebook's restrictive interfaces and aggressive push to merge personal and online lives, Twitter's character limit, Reddit's tree-based ranked discussion structure or its obliteration of any iota of personalisation to profiles). Even with the current BlueSky boom it's wild that so many techies tried to persevere with Twitter in the last few years (the boosting of subscribers to the top of all replies should've been instant death).
The few forums I was on back then that actually survived that mass migration are _still_ around and some of the only fun parts of the internet.
not an expert at all but maybe if ipv6 was embraced it'd result in people returning to doing a lot more grassroots stuff and just by being fun it'd massively challenge the grimness of the last 10 or so years of an increasingly restrictive online experience.