I keep feeling frustrated as valuable knowledge for my different hobbies over the last years became siloed away in corporate social media. I believe wikis could be a way out, but can we have decentralized, federated wiki software that can kind of talk among each other?
I think wikis have already gotten there, at least for games. All of the game wikis have gotten consolidated into fandom/Wikia, which, from my experience, has enshittification levels that makes viewing Reddit from a phone browser feel likea slick experience. You can’t avoid it either. Wikis that used to be very good (at least compared to fandom, like gamepedia), have somehow gotten all pulled into the enshittification vacuum.
A few days ago I was on the Minecraft wiki, but I was playing b1.7.3 so I was viewing it on wayback. And holy shit, before fandom bought out gamepedia (albeit I was looking at the pre-gamepedia wiki), the wiki was actually usable.
No matter Games and Fandom wikis have enshittified the wiki movement, but I think we can and should revive or create a new wiki movement for practical stuff, like gardening, cooking, woodworking, animal care etc. A lot of that used to be on forums (not the most ideal form of storing knowledge) and then most of it disappeared on Facebook. Not sure it it’s still there, the fb got too shitty, had to leave. Went to reddit, and at first it was okay, but more tech and less practical oriented. It was noticeable that from forum to facebook to reddit, information density and quality about certain topics had declined. So I believe that a mature internet use would be to avoid those platforms like the plague. Aynthing valuable, especially our valuable community efforts, our hobbies and favourite activities, has to be kept out of corporate hands. When I started to save my photos on Google and contact my family on Facebook all those years ago it was just convenient. I don’t think we had any idea about the can of worms this all was. Now I feel like a recovering drug addict, but it’s worth it for a better web.