One might quibble about blogs being Reddit when Tumblr and Medium and Substack exist, or forums being Reddit when Facebook groups exist, but that would be missing the point. Whether the number is one or a dozen, or even several dozen, it's not like the thousands upon thousands of independent sites that used to exist. While openness and distributed ownership/control are not the same thing, it seems like it's hard for the former to survive without the latter.
That's why so many people are looking to the fediverse and its imitators to replace the falling monoliths. There are problems there as well, both technical and social, but at least there's hope that they can grow into solutions without being assassinated by a single rich psycho. All it takes is for people to stop thought-experimenting on yet another rich-guy-owned monolith and start actually hacking toward a permanent and public solution.
One might quibble about blogs being Reddit when Tumblr and Medium and Substack exist, or forums being Reddit when Facebook groups exist, but that would be missing the point. Whether the number is one or a dozen, or even several dozen, it's not like the thousands upon thousands of independent sites that used to exist. While openness and distributed ownership/control are not the same thing, it seems like it's hard for the former to survive without the latter.
That's why so many people are looking to the fediverse and its imitators to replace the falling monoliths. There are problems there as well, both technical and social, but at least there's hope that they can grow into solutions without being assassinated by a single rich psycho. All it takes is for people to stop thought-experimenting on yet another rich-guy-owned monolith and start actually hacking toward a permanent and public solution.