When I was growing up the internet was a place to be liberated from the world say what you want to say, be whoever you want and form genuine communities with shared interests. Now the internet feels like a tool to enslave the mind with identity echo chambers and any deviation leads you to being banned and blocked shunned and silenced within a void that is inescapable. Novel unique websites coded manually by hobbyists running servers for free in the commons allowing people access to the free flow of information under the banner of “information should be free” has largely gone away with corpratisation. I miss the days when the internet was populated largely by nerds aiming to make a better world not this controlled censored hell hole of profiteering.
Echo chambers are what happens often when you trust personalized algorithms. You pick specifically the things you agrree with, and then later you don’t get exposed to things beyond your own worldview and interests. And recently, algorithms have been proliferating all over the internet and there’s a lot of discouragement from using smaller services - a lot of it has to do with how the variety of content on the bigger social media networks is not yet replicated on smaller sites. The fact that smaller sites have now become usable thanks to Reddit and Twitter going down the drain makes me feel like on one hand I feel more free now because I can explore all sorts of sites and more people will be there, but on the other hand I am intimidated by the sheer amount of alternatives and my mind can’t manage with all of them at once, so I minimize my general social media usage. The fediverse is, in a way, consisting of “novel unique websites coded manually by hobbyists running servers for free”.