Kev is a bit of a personal hero of mine, he’s just an ordinary IT professional (like me) who uses his free time to blog about important tech issues, write open source and run fosstodon - one of the larger and more active mastodon instances. More info is available at his site https://kevq.uk
The only thing I disagree with him on in this manifesto is that there is nothing we can do. We can and are fighting a lot of the bullshit with decentralisation and decommercialisation of the many services. It is a slow and painful process that isn’t happening overnight but people are waking up to how crap Meta Facebook is (fuck Mark and his awful attempt at distracting folks with a rebrand) - anecdotal but most people I’ve spoken to in recent months about Facebook say they only keep it around for messenger and meme groups or they have deleted it entirely and they say they no longer share life updates or engage in ‘meaningful’ discussion there.
There is a huge opportunity for a grassroots push away from the corporate Web and surely we’ve got to take it? We can keep building usable tools like Lemmy, Mastodon and simple to use indieweb tooling to help draw in the average Joe and evangelising where possible. We should try to use some of their tools against them e.g pool together to pay for ads on Facebook, reddit etc to pull people away.
The decentralise and federate and anti-corporate web movement gives me hope that whilst the Web is fucked we can still fix it
Kev is a bit of a personal hero of mine, he’s just an ordinary IT professional (like me) who uses his free time to blog about important tech issues, write open source and run fosstodon - one of the larger and more active mastodon instances. More info is available at his site https://kevq.uk
The only thing I disagree with him on in this manifesto is that there is nothing we can do. We can and are fighting a lot of the bullshit with decentralisation and decommercialisation of the many services. It is a slow and painful process that isn’t happening overnight but people are waking up to how crap
MetaFacebook is (fuck Mark and his awful attempt at distracting folks with a rebrand) - anecdotal but most people I’ve spoken to in recent months about Facebook say they only keep it around for messenger and meme groups or they have deleted it entirely and they say they no longer share life updates or engage in ‘meaningful’ discussion there.There is a huge opportunity for a grassroots push away from the corporate Web and surely we’ve got to take it? We can keep building usable tools like Lemmy, Mastodon and simple to use indieweb tooling to help draw in the average Joe and evangelising where possible. We should try to use some of their tools against them e.g pool together to pay for ads on Facebook, reddit etc to pull people away.
The decentralise and federate and anti-corporate web movement gives me hope that whilst the Web is fucked we can still fix it