I don’t think it’s necessarily escaping places like the Fediverse, but the internet as it exists… I don’t know if there’s a way to “heal” it or stop it from getting worse, honestly. So I very much feel like there’s opportunity for people to “disconnect” while also being somewhat connected. Local websites tailored to community needs as opposed to corporate ones.
I mean, if “Big Tech Won’t Broadcast Your Dissent” and the costs of maintaining alternative communities rise, due to the cost of renting servers, it may just make more sense to make a local intranet with your buddies who all have their own Jellyfin servers too, and that becomes a community resource so nobody in the complex needs a streaming service. I mean I have RomM, which allows me to play tons and tons of old video game ROMs in a web browser, so that could become a community resource, too.
There could be community forums and community weblogs, allowing people to update each other on new developments in the community, and updates to community servers, scheduled maintenance times etc. Sneakernets could share local community updates among different local LANs in the area, and share files via traditional file transfer from one disk to another so other communities can get new entertainment, etc.
Especially with Microsoft demanding everyone have a TPM 2.0 chip for Windows 11 there is currently a lot of shunted hardware that could easily be turned into local server stacks and then the only cost is replacement parts if things go down and the regular cost of electricity and maybe a handful of uninterruptible power supplies, and that’s only really if you’re on a system that power loss could cause problematic data corruption.
TL;DR: Seizing the means of communication may be just as important as seizing the means of production. In this case we don’t “seize it” we make our own parallel systems.
I don’t think it’s necessarily escaping places like the Fediverse, but the internet as it exists… I don’t know if there’s a way to “heal” it or stop it from getting worse, honestly. So I very much feel like there’s opportunity for people to “disconnect” while also being somewhat connected. Local websites tailored to community needs as opposed to corporate ones.
I mean, if “Big Tech Won’t Broadcast Your Dissent” and the costs of maintaining alternative communities rise, due to the cost of renting servers, it may just make more sense to make a local intranet with your buddies who all have their own Jellyfin servers too, and that becomes a community resource so nobody in the complex needs a streaming service. I mean I have RomM, which allows me to play tons and tons of old video game ROMs in a web browser, so that could become a community resource, too.
There could be community forums and community weblogs, allowing people to update each other on new developments in the community, and updates to community servers, scheduled maintenance times etc. Sneakernets could share local community updates among different local LANs in the area, and share files via traditional file transfer from one disk to another so other communities can get new entertainment, etc.
Especially with Microsoft demanding everyone have a TPM 2.0 chip for Windows 11 there is currently a lot of shunted hardware that could easily be turned into local server stacks and then the only cost is replacement parts if things go down and the regular cost of electricity and maybe a handful of uninterruptible power supplies, and that’s only really if you’re on a system that power loss could cause problematic data corruption.
TL;DR: Seizing the means of communication may be just as important as seizing the means of production. In this case we don’t “seize it” we make our own parallel systems.