Web 2.0 was a mistake. Re-Balkanize the internet.

Centralizing everything is bad, actually. It exposes people to their harassers, abusers, and worse. It promotes harassment, doxing, and worse. Social media is not an improvement over forums and mailing lists. Discord is not an improvement over IRC.

Further, the scale of modern social media makes it virtually impossible to properly moderate any platform, and commercial interest means that proper moderation is not in any social media platform's fiscal interests. Accounts are commodities.

Obviously individual forums depended entirely on who owned and moderated them, and some could be downright terrible as a result. But it was easy to make your own as an alternative. Some forums are still around now, all over the internet, in fact. But social media with its ability

to have DM groups, pages, groups whether private or otherwise, to curate your own followers, following, friends, and blocks as well as search engines preferentially pointing to them and lots of money to be made by generating traffic and the holy grail of engagement.

It doesn't really matter if Zuckerberg intended Facebook to be used to promote violence and even genocide, nor does it matter if Jack intended to coddle Nazis on Twitter, the fact is that this is where we are.

Social media is not an unalloyed evil thing. There are a lot of good things about it, or we wouldn't be using it. But it seems to me that it's near impossible to get any of these corporations to actually *care* about correcting the bad parts.

Google started off as a much better search engine than most that came before it, but now it's on its way to just being the Internet. This is not a good thing.

Mastodon's a step in the right direction. Nazi and Terf instances can just be locked out of the rest of the network.

The moment the open internet died was when people figured out it was a great way to make money. From that point on, it was increasingly geared toward funneling cash to wealthy corporations. The dotcom bubble was a hiccup, but look where we are now.

I should stop adding to this. Instead, have some astronomy-spoiling Muskellites. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/1/7/21003272/space-x-starlink-astronomy-light-pollution

No wait, one more. Web 2.0 is a panopticon. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/depressed-woman-loses-benefits-over-facebook-photos-1.861843

Not going to dismiss the good that's come in the past decade - the Arab Spring, video evidence of police brutality, etc. though.