For those who don't know, there is an open protocol called Activitypub, which facilitates federated social networking, such as Mastodon, a federated service which isn't entirely unlike Twitter. Of course, with the downturn in Twitter users, big tech firms such as Facebook/Meta with "P92" and Cloudflare with Wildebeest (worth noting is that Wildebeest appears to be a nearly 1:1 clone of Mastodon) appear eager to try and capitalize on this (I can't fathom why-- my federated timeline is mostly pornography and anticapitalist politics, neither of which are exactly advertiser-friendly).
Part of the issue with the internet nowadays, in my opinion at least, is that everything has to be advertiser-friendly, or at the minimum Mastercard-friendly, especially with how the firms that are expected to make both of those things happen are so large in size (hence the term "big tech," or "Big Data" -- for anyone who understands slightly obscure 2010s pop culture references). Of course, there is a definite need to verify that those acting in pornography are 18 or older, but at the same time, companies like Mastercard pulling the rug out from content they simply find unsavory (but otherwise considered legal) should be a warning as to the sheer amount of control they have over the 'net. The other part of the issue is how big tech has managed to become the "center" of the internet-- if you go to a website for, say, a band, they'll likely almost immediately link you to a Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram account, (in my experience, at least) a lot of people's first port-of-call for contacting someone is Facebook Messenger or Instagram private messages (the former of which only appears to be end-to-end encrypted when elected by either party, and it remains unclear if Instagram has any form of end-to-end encryption).
The fact that firms such as Facebook wish to meddle in the open internet is especially alarming, seeing that many people who sought privacy, free expression, or niche communities have either moved to or started out on services such as Mastodon-- and it has been made clear that Facebook is objectively anti-privacy, (at least the aforementioned Cloudflare is/was actively fighting federal power) given the fact that they turned over messages pertaining to an abortion to authorities in Nebraska, or that they don't know what they're doing with your data, or the fact that they may fail to adequately enforce their own content moderation policies regarding nonconsensual imagery. Of course, wrongdoing exists everywhere, even on the internet-- for example, mastodon.social is seemingly run by pro-Facebook management, especially since they won't answer to criticism of their plans.
I fear that if the "open internet" or fediverse becomes plagued by for-profit firms, a large portion of sites will become defederated (meaning they will be cut off from the rest of the fediverse)-- the Mastodon instance I use is already hostile towards "deviating" sites (Click on "제한된 서버들" to view restricted sites), and mastodon.social (the "flagship" Mastodon instance) blocks a large number of sites, albiet without any remote clear emphasis on censoring pornography and/or deviating speech. Of course, that's not to say that all federated services are run by good people, for example, take lemmy.ml, the "flagship" instance of Lemmy (an Activitypub-based Reddit-like service), where the moderators are/were allegedly removing speech critical of the government of the People's Republic of China. Even then, bad people are easier to silence than bad corporations-- Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, etc. are omnipresent-- or if you're reading my website in Korea, Naver, Kakao/Daum, and SK Group (as well as the western firms) are omnipresent. On the other hand, bad people are easily silenced and ignored, as they can only be handling so many things at once.
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