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The beginning of the end of corporate-dominated social media

Cross-posted to 3 groups.

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The point of this post is to start a discussion 
on how Usenet could take its rightful place back 
at the center of social media, in light of the 
political implosion of big tech corporate-owned 
social media.

Predictably, the big tech corporate social media 
companies that replaced Usenet and blogging have 
passed their peak. They have only themselves to 
blame. People are abandoning them in droves over 
the draconian enforcement of executives' 
political opinions and unremitting tracking of 
their users' internet activities, app usage and 
physical movements. They have turned into a 
place where companies blast users with whatever 
they want them to read. The average end-user is 
left to think that can communicate with the 
influencers, when really that's an illusion. 
They communicate mainly with bots and trolls and 
the typical conversations are at the level of a 
subway argument.

Users have started migrating to alternatives, 
although the lack of interoperability between 
these networks limits their futures just as the 
walled gardens at Facebook and Twitter have 
limited theirs. One of the few alternatives 
having the fundamental openness of Usenet, 
Mastodon, has devolved into a patchwork of 
walled gardens as their local administrators 
follow the lead of big tech in enforcing 
political orthodoxy. 

Usenet could again rise to the top of the social 
media market, if not for a lack of open source 
easy to use mobile clients and sufficient 
marketing to get them onto the phones of the 
mass market. Unlike with corporate social media, 
fixing Usenet would require only a moderate 
degree of technical effort, not a fundamental 
change in the attitudes of those who manage it.

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The beginning of the end of corporate-dominated social media MUGA <muga@runbox.com> - 2020-09-13 13:43 -0400
  Re: The beginning of the end of corporate-dominated social media Daniel <me@sci.fidan.com> - 2021-02-02 08:28 -0800

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