2023 is coming to an end and I personally believe it has been one of the best "internet years" in a long time:
I have always thought that time on the internet travels at different speeds: those who have lived through the era of IRC, forums, blogs, MSN, etc. should remember them as real historical epochs.
Well, for a while now the internet has made me feel quite lonely, despite the hundreds/thousands of contacts and exchanges I have had with Facebook (abandoned in 2020) Twitter (abandoned in 2022) and Instagram (where I still resist, somehow).
Interactions dictated by algorithms and forced management of numbers, the proliferation of generic memes and even identical ways of speaking and communicating used by people from different countries.
It's hard to explain it in two lines, but it's a feeling very similar to what drove David Bowie and Brian Eno to write I'm Afraid of Americans:
'I'm Afraid of Americans' was written by myself and Eno. It's not as truly hostile about Americans as say 'Born in the U.S.A.': it's merely sardonic. I was traveling in Java when the first McDonald's went up: it was like, 'for fuck's sake.' The invasion by any homogenized culture is so depressing, the erection of another Disney World in, say, Umbria, Italy, more so. It strangles the indigenous culture and narrows expression of life.[1]
I think the internet has become a place where people are increasingly disconnected from each other, even though they are more connected than ever before.
We are all living in our own echo chambers, surrounded by people who think the same way as us.
The Fediverse
Also for these reasons I am one of those strongly opposed to the federation of Threads (which in any case seems to me a dead project from the start, fortunately) and who believes in a change of perspective from what can be born and grow directly in the Fediverse.
First of all, I am very interested in communicating with people from all over the world and especially who live in radically different realities from mine (Italian, Greek, generally European), perhaps discussing some of the nerd topics that over the years have ended up being a common thread in my life, such as video games, anime, movies, or more generally speaking Stories.
I believe that the Fediverse has the potential to be a truly global platform, connecting people from all walks of life.
And, at the same time, be a small and niche reality with rather low numbers, irrelevant for the market and for the media (except for those more oriented towards certain uberspecific targets) but extremely important for human relationships with small groups of people who write and collaborate, a bit like in the field of computer science it happens in certain repositories or communities dedicated to specific topics.
Numbers
Recently, in an Italian post addressing the issue of Threads, I found myself thinking about Dunbar's number.
I firmly believe that it is very complicated to treat more than 300-400 individuals as authentic people, even superficially.
This is interesting when we consider how flame wars are born and flourish on centralized social media.
These flame wars involve people who literally do not know each other, yet they are ready to insult each other for the most trivial reasons.
This happens after exchanges of impromptu comments that will disappear like tears in the rain, leaving behind only a fragment of toxic aggressiveness.
So what's the point?
It is rather utopian to think that the Fediverse can change the world, or that, with the eventual growth of its inhabitants, certain toxic dynamics will not tend to reappear.
I think it is more than anything a great opportunity to improve "our particular," the slice of the internet that we want to take for ourselves.
In various forms, I started this blog to collect thoughts and things more than ten years ago with the same spirit and, for this reason too, I believe that a return of personal websites/blogs is an extremely important incentive for the Fediverse itself.
Maybe some digital archaeologist of the future will have a hard time finding our traces in the midst of so much massive junk, but who knows. In perspective, I believe that they may find it more interesting and enlightening to understand the different ways that humans use to express themselves outside of prefabricated systems, maintaining that spirit that characterized the internet until the early 2000s.