Asklemmy

Social media companies created algorithms to allow people to find content without having to look for it. This drove users and content creators to their sites and off the web.

For social media companies, a user's value comes from having an account, so they have a vested interest in locking away content. For content creators, it is a lot easier to get noticed if an algorithm provides the advertising and some sites now allow for monetization within their walled garden. For users, they get content that never ends.

Capitalism. To a capitalist, the internet is another domain to squeeze until the last penny drops. Big corporations like Google don't care about the internet being useful to people, they have only one objective: make number go up. And if that means smashing the web to pieces, you can guarantee they'll try.

Capitalism.

Google's the main contributor to closing the web off, they even straight-up admitted to that a few months ago and tried to DRM the web with WEI, but that failed with massive backlash.

Boohoo, the open web is broken....

• You caused it, MF'ers....

But yeah, walled gardens like Discord, Google, Meta, and Twitter certainly aren't helping matters, and even some of the alternatives got some controversy of their own, eg. Bsky recently censoring people on their main PDS, although given ATproto is an open protocol, there's no one and nothing stopping you from setting up an account on a third-party PDS like Blacksky or Northsky, or hosting your own, for example.

Apart from that, more open and decentralized/self-hostable alternatives need to crop up and fast, and we already have ATProto, ActivityPub/the Fediverse, PeerSuite, XMPP, and even LBRY/Odysee.

capitalism i guess

Consolidation of wealth.

Aka, capitalism.

The love of money. Making a profit is not enough, it has to be growing and accelerating all the time.

Bots and AI. But rooted back to capitalism as someone else already said.

Dead internet theory is real.

Corporate consolidation is the end goal and all of the others are part of the toolkit for accomplishing that. (You can use those tools for other things, but a hammer with blood on it is a murder weapon no matter how many nails are in it's past or future)

I think that we need more hybrid online/irl communities. Half of these issues at least can be avoided by treating digital spaces as the temporary fever dreams they are.

Polarisation and capitalism, with algorithms and mass surveillance.

people.

people don't like openness and freedom. it's scary. they prefer to be coddled by walled gardens and curated experiences that make sure they don't come across anything they find unpleasant or disagreeable.

most people are very happy to be spoonfed bias-confirming garbage their entire life, and re-regurgitating it out again. the open internet is a huge threat to those people.

As a Brit... Government policy is doing a pretty good job. Everything is making running an independent site completely infeasible. They're legislating as if the only people who run sites are big tech corporations who have money to burn on compliance.

Trolling and doxxing are a big part of it. A lot of people (not me, obviously) don't want to share anything real online if it's going to be used against them.

Greed

Consolidations of forums onto subreddit style systems including Lemmy. They almost completely replaced individual forums with subtopics.

While Lemmy is still open the consolidations really cut down on the independence of a lot of the older forums or even whole sites.

Walled gardens are most of the problem, and they're only getting more walled over time as companies move from expanding their platform to exploiting it for returns. CloudFlare is kind of an exception, as it's still giving away a lot of free services. Once it starts being evil it's going to really suck.

Closed-down hardware is the biggest emerging threat. You can leave the proprietary software ecosystem if you want, but a SoC is DIY-resistant.

The surveillance is more of a surprise tool for when shit gets really ugly. Which is super bad, but not directly about the internet.

My gut says capitalism. So I would be extremely interested in examples where:

• There was a large open community, hosted not-for-profit
• The community is now thoroughly dead, with no serious capitalist alternative or clear successor

4-chan isn't dead, is still pretty open, and doesn't have a real competitor for what it is. Certain forums and chatrooms would qualify if reddit didn't exist (but reddit really clearly killed several of these).

Big brands like Google, Microsoft, Facebook

Walled Garden sides, they should be forbidden

Closed source software

Non federated services like chats

services not protocols

"economies of scale"

Whether you like it or not, its censorship. Ppl with opposite political views silencing eachother creating echo chambers of only ppl who align with them politically.

Things are too strict now, every one has a mega phone and wants to shout at eachother and their opinion. The internet has become one big political pile of shit, most actually chill ppl, avoid it as a source of escapism.

Barrier to entry. Not enough laid back open minded ppl. So now, everyone's separated and closed off. Ppl just want control

It's not about connection and getting information, it's all about pushing some fucking agenda.