A while ago I started loosing hope in the internet, even before ai it was mostly bots, and copy and paste articles. Everything is exponentially getting more and more malicious, with algorithms made to suck you in with obviously no care for the human user, just make stock go up, and make comically evil board members happy.
Not enough people are talking about what lemmy and bluesky have done, I’m not that tech savvy but from what I’ve understand their decentralized nature makes people always in control as opposed to one company.
Going on these sites brings me back to the earlier days of the internet, where it felt like interacting with real people, posting to an actual community, rather than being in one of those dystopian movies with slurm drinks and infinite amount of trash being pumped out by bots, to get as many views for monetization/outreach which is what pretty much all major social medias feel today.
They are decentralized, the architecture is just more complicated and harder to run, but they are in fact decentralized.
You can run your own pds(data host), relay (pulls data from all pds), app view (app frontend), moderation (still in progress albeit), and even algorithms.
We have to stop saying they aren’t decentralized just because it’s more complicated and restrictive, large social media platforms will inherently be complicated and expensive in order to be reliant and fast.