This.

Back in the day this is how the internet worked. Every forum host was just some guy or girl hosting a platform so they coukd build a community with the people and hobbies they love.

We need to go back closer to that world. The fediverse bridges the gap between the centralized experience, and decentralized management.

Optimistically, it’s the best of both worlds.

Yeah, pretty much. This and Discord really. Signal for P2P messaging.

I was working in the IT admin office for a time while doing software development, and got to witness this guy who came in to have his laptop fixed/swapped; and he said “You guys don’t like, check the laptops for files and stuff, right?”.

And the IT guy was legendary, didn’t skip a beat, was like “Nah, nah, we don’t have time for that crap.”.

As soon as the guy was out of the room, we checked his laptop’s files.

Porn. So much porn. Like, gigs of it, and this was in the early 2000’s when that meant a lot.

We went to HR, and they called him up and reviewed, and SOMEHOW, he dodged the bullet and they retained him. The reason? It was his porn. You read that right. He had gigs of porn of him banging his stripper GF on his laptop, and because it wasn’t “downloaded” porn, he got off.

Then a month later he was let go when he was found taking pictures with his cell phone over the cubicle wall of a female employee without her knowledge.

But I’ll never forget the mental gymnastics that happened to convince HR that porn only meant pictures of “other people” being naked, not himself and his GF.