Interesting effortpost dropped about institutional level internet censorship calling it the "closure of the internet". It's very tl;dr but it goes into detail what many of the top social media sites did from 2015-22, and breaks it down into two phases, the post Trump/Brexit era of 15-19, and the COVID lockdown era of 2020-22.

Also it tellingly mentions that it never ended, Twitter just dialed back and everyone else has the infrastructure in place.

Of course there are also people who will deny with a smile that this actually happened.

https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-internet

@sendpaws Correct - the censorship infrastructure has not been dismantled and another major wave is likely coming. The author even recognizes that LLMs will make it much worse than the previous one.

But everyone is still using centralized platforms like there is no tomorrow.

@silverpill @sendpaws >But everyone is still using centralized platforms like there is no tomorrow.

While things might be slightly better on decentralized platforms like Fedi, they aren't much better; the obsession with "censorship" has spread here too. If it hadn't reached this place, most instances wouldn't have such a long list of rules, but rather a simple code of conduct that everyone could agree on.

@caohuak @sendpaws I think there is a big difference between being defederated and being deplatformed. In fediverse you don't need to start from scratch, you can move between servers and you can start your own.

Some people may not like you and be very loud about it, but ultimately they only have as much power as others give them. The best strategy is to ignore the haters and keep doing your own thing.

@theorytoe @sendpaws @caohuak Yes, and you can just ignore all of this. The part on the network that is free of blocklists is big enough to be interesting. What this part of the network doesn't have, apparently, is people who will be interested in growing it.