I’ve been in tech for thirty years and my answer is, no, I don’t. I saved your message along with some others that I hope to read in depth one day because it seems helpful. I just have less and less of a desire to fuck with shit anymore. I remember how excited I was about tech at various points in my career. I used to be so into tech. Anymore, I get off work supervising over twenty other folks on implementing, managing, and maintaining disparate technical solutions and products on and off prem along with a slew of cross functional organizations and my desire to do anything tech dies just after the surface. So I dumped Reddit because I agree with the reasons and jumped on lemmy. I use wefef. That’s as far as I’ve gone. I won’t use reddit anymore out of principle but I miss it.
As another example, I used to pirate the shit out of stuff. Into the scene big time. Became ‘successful’ and subscribed (and invested) in all the services. Just recently canceled all my subscriptions and moved to real debrid with torrentio or w/e. I was able to get it going in an hour and it makes sense. Hell I’d pay $100 a month for what I have now but whatever. It’s not about the money as much as the ease of experience. I keep Netflix because it makes it easier to find stuff I want to watch but that’s all.
I know I could sit down and spend an afternoon getting my shit setup to better deliver content to me across instances and everything if I’d just do it. Instead I just see what’s in the standard feed this evening and start doing some crosswords before bed instead. I think I’m just burnt out on technology. Kudos to what everyone is building and all the investment being put into educating folks though. I don’t think I have any critique other than it’s just too much more difficult for me than Reddit was to find everything and I’m getting old and tech disinterested.
I really appreciate and understand the value of federating services but to claim theirs no value, big picture community wise, in having a central access point to content is willfully ignorant of a broad user base in my opinion. None is this stuff is new, it’s just a new wave of human nature with updated technology.
Most folks barely know how to utilize a web browser, that doesn’t mean that they have less value or less interesting or compelling information to provide the world; it just means it won’t be shared on the platform, or even if it is they likely won’t be heard.
For broad user adoption systems need to be designed for our grandparents not our peers because most folks are a lot closer to the former than the latter, even our peers in tech.