Re: Everyone’s Packing Up

I read this post and found myself thinking: …and then what?

Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand the reasons people are leaving, and I think many of those reasons are entirely valid. In fact, if you’ve been paying attention here, you’ll know that I’m one of the people considering such a move myself and for similar reasons as stated —“Someone spent years somewhere, it changed under them, and now they’re packing up”— but I’m not sure the reason for just leaving a service/system is always the right move. Perhaps leaving isn’t necessarily the same thing as resisting the changes that bring that about, and I’m increasingly interested in what happens afterwards.

There’s an old argument in politics that says you can’t influence the system if you aren’t in the system. I wonder if everyone who cares about a better, more open internet packs up and retreats to their own little corners, aren’t we also leaving the big platforms with an even bigger share of the conversation?

I mean I know that Facebook has already won, that many millions of people think it IS the internet, and exist happily in that bubble, but part of me thinks there must be somewhere to fight back… or is it as futile as I imagine?

And there’s another problem. If we all disperse into hundreds or thousands of smaller independent spaces, how do we find each other?

RSS, blogrolls, link pages, webrings, feeds and the various attempts at decentralised social networks can help, but they still require some form of connection and discovery. Otherwise, the independent web (of which the indieweb is but a part) risks becoming lots of lovely little islands that nobody knows are there.

So perhaps the question isn’t simply whether we should leave. It’s what we build around the leaving. How do we maintain discovery, conversation and community without recreating the very centralised platforms we’re trying to get away from?

Maybe the future is smaller, more distributed and more personal but I wonder how we stop distributed becoming disconnected?

Places like Bubbles, Scour and the like are a good start. But I think we need more. Is the fediverse really the answer? Can it be?