Because of network effects the understanding of a monopoly has to grow with changing technology.
The fundamental problem is that it wouldn’t even be desireable to split up many of the new social media and internet technologies because that would reduce the quality for everyone, increase costs to support as a business and increase environmental damage from duplicating server storage and power consumption.
What we need is to turn them into public utilities that have significant democratic input by their own workforce (the experts and enthusiasts) and the users (the billions of people who actually create the value for the thing).
This is a somewhat surprising position to see in the fediverse…
(I mean, I get what you’re saying, and I guess someone should bring that to the party, but there is s different way)
Hmm well arguably I ought to rethink my opinion now that lemmy is working well enough.
Look at how many niche communities tried to move from reddit to lemmy and failed. Basically all of them. Even just a little pushback of reddit did a lot (not letting communities be abandoned or closed). Then lemmy is becoming increasingly fragmented (e.g. US imperialists and socialist instances). Then you have people deleting years worth of contribution and valuable content on reddit, answers to questions etc. Or what happens when ~20% of the current lemmy instances fold because of server cost or lost interest? And ultimately how much of a dent on a civilization level is the fediverse going to make?
All that are example of how network effects create a “toll” if you try to leave them.
The EU recently mandated that messenger apps need to create a compatibility layer and afaik even that looks like it’s going to fail to work as thought.
