In particular, it seems to me that centralization is almost a law of the universe (or at least a tendency). Lemmy may start decentralized, with dozens or hundreds of meaningfully-sized instances, but it’s easy to imagine a not-far future where most everyone has settled on just a handful of instances (or even just one).
I don’t mean to just be a pessimist here. I’m sure I’m far from the first person to wonder about this, and I’m curious whether there are ideas of how to counterbalance the tendency toward centralization.
I’d imagine at some point we don’t need to interact with all sorts of UIs and websites, our personal AI assistants can just do it for us and send and receive information for us from where ever and present in whatever shape we want on our devices or through speech. That means centralization loses an advantage, doesn’t matter where my friend posted something as long as it’s authenticated, my AI can see it, push it forward to my “information desk” and present/read it to me.
I see. But I can imagine there’s an equal chance that this situation pushes everything towards centralisation because if this AI can pick it all up from anywhere, and you don’t interact with the UI directly, why bother posting something on an alternative to Twitter? Might as well post it at the same place because your friend’s AI would just show them your post and not the ecosystem you posted it in.