It feels like the web is becoming more closed every year — fewer open forums, more platforms locking away data and communities behind logins. What do you think are the biggest forces driving the decline of the open internet? Are walled gardens like Discord the main problem, or is it something else like artificial intelligence, corporate consolidation, surveillance, or changing user habits?

  • Artisian@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    19 hours ago

    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).