This was catalogs. Travel blogs. A chat room or two.

💀

I liked the Smarter Every Day video where he compares the data collection industry to fossil fuels. It’s the “unclean” source of energy that was used to bootstrap the early internet. Initially the internet was just a bunch of ideas that couldn’t sustain themselves and would all die out (dot com bubble), until eventually Google and the rest figured out they could harvest everyone’s data and sell it. For better and worse, this made the internet viable, and people started using it for everything.

Now we’re approaching a point where we all understand what the internet can do for us, we just need to find a “clean” source of energy to run it in a way that respects the users. Maybe the fediverse is that, maybe something else.

I suspect that if the fediverse can’t survive the embrace/extend/extinguish practice of corporations, then it’s not quite there yet.

This brings back memories