The internet is essentially an infinite world

I think this worldview is part of the problem. Nothing is infinite, not even the Internet. The tiny pillars that maintain critical pieces will eventually move on. We used to joke that the Internet is forever, but it’s not. Data decays and dies. Old web pages are lost.

Archive.org, Wikipedia, Linux, free and open-source things we take for granted could just disappear.

Even the scope of the Internet isn’t infinite. Just because something is created doesn’t mean that people will see it, and not everything you can think of exists on the Internet.

It’s large, for sure, but it has boundaries. Boundaries we can see in macroscopic forms.

you become nothing.

You are not nothing because you’re not lost in an infinite landscape. Again, the Internet has boundaries, and singular actions that nobody has seen can happen.

The Internet is just a bunch of servers my dude.

Someone has to pay for them, and all the other infrastructure around them. And with a large part of the world being on the internet a significant portion of their day the costs for even the most efficient centralized services running “at scale” (see: hundreds of millions MAU) are astronomical. In the tens of millions to hundreds of millions of $ annually, just an infrastructure, never mind human resources.

Almost none of these companies survive off of donations. Wikipedia stands out as one that does mainly because they host static content, which is incredibly cost efficient to serve up., and even then their costs are pretty astronomical (there are some debates around their costs of course).

Federated services have an asymmetric scaling problem. A linear growth in users results in a exponential growth in infrastructure costs. While centralized services tend to be almost the entire opposite of that and usually see logarithmic infrastructure costs against linear user growth. Where infrastructure costs are more efficient as their user base grows.

Federated services don’t benefit from running at scale, the more they scale up the less benefit there is to scaling. It’s a really shit situation to be in.

This is why the internet is largely just cyber feudalism. Because the only ones that can afford to host large scaled services for their users are the ones that are making money off of it. And that’s for centralized services, never mind decentralized services which are unbelievably more expensive to host.

I’m coming at this from the standpoint of an engineer, I don’t have answers or solutions, but the first thing we have to do in order to start figuring out solutions is to recognize the problem.

All of that being said, I’m just saying it fucking sucks to continuously be a refugee, and what sucks about apps and companies and programs that end up selling out for a dollar is that if you don’t emmigrate to a new platform, you become nothing.

App and companies aren’t the only choice. Back in our internet roots you set up your own website to share your views. If you wanted real time chat we had telnet chat and later IRC. Your same telnet client worked on every server. Your browser was able to view every page.

Idk I’m kinda used to it, maybe that’s from growing up with Aol handing out disks at the supermarket to this. Being a refugee doesn’t bother me. If anything the ability to tank a corpo by making something new is kinda fun.

That being said I can see a point where that becomes impossible or just too difficult financially. That other comment about it needing basically 300 m to start a new instance really got me thinking. Is it just impossible for bluesky to fix itself now? I can see why it’s not a priority from a corpo perspective but is this something that the team could fix if they made it a priority now? or is the need to keep one ID simply in compatible with the fedverse?