itch.io

Thank you, it means a lot to read that. I made the blog something I couldn’t get The Numbers on so I could project my thoughts without the nagging feeling that I should “check how it’s doing”. Unfortunately we live pretty firmly in a Numbers world. I may migrate the blog in spirit to itch.io, but I haven’t decided yet. A lot of those blog posts don’t need updating for quite a while.

The apathy I see from parents in general (not just in this generation) further cements my idea that parents aren’t all that upset by this, but that it’s an easy “think of the children” argument to make. “Hey, I have children! I wouldn’t want them to be in danger!” is one of those impossible arguments to win.

I agree, I think I2P and the things you mentioned are probably the future of the “obscene” net. I would argue the free and open internet is already somewhat lost, from the change in perspective from both the users and hosts. Folks want the centralized, closed internet that we live in now - Twitter had very little migration after its changeover.

I think your theory of federated services has merit, but I’m not sure if I agree with the rest. We have seen several instances of the general public shunning federated or open services in favor of centralized, usually corporate entities. When Twitter had its oopsie, it was BlueSky that picked up the slack (for furries), not Mastodon. FOSS/federated services typically have jank of some kind, to put it kindly, and from my experience, the average user is completely unwilling to put up with that. Most users are not developers, or even particuarly computer-savvy, because they don’t need to be anymore. Similarly, Discord’s decline has led to no switches in my circles, because 1. people won’t tolerate the jank of Matrix clients or XMPP clients; and 2. if something is lesser to use than what they use now, they are unwilling to “downgrade”. End-to-end encryption and decentralized hosts are a hard sell when your average user has all their friends already on Discord.

VPNs as a means of creating communities is an interesting idea. You’d create a closed loop of trusted users. I would personally never trust people in that loop, with how prevalent social hacking is nowadays (look at all the Discord tokens stolen), but it is an option for a fairly shielded community.

But I appreciate your optimism. I really hope you’re right, hahaha. I vote every general and midterm election, it’s all the power I have in the world. Nerds tend to find a way.