As a relative "youngin" (I'm 27), at what point did we make the shift from protocols to corporate-owned ecosystems? What caused it? The rise of the VC funding model? The Silicon Valley ethos of "build an MVP, grow quickly without making money," and users adopting corporate owned solutions because they're easy?
If so, how do we dismantle this? Not from a technical perspective -- atproto for example seems powerful enough -- but from a social/economic/mindshare perspective.
Centralized moderation is a big thing.
Usenet was a very open system, where iirc moderation sometimes happened per discussion group but otherwise everyone individually had to ignore bad actors (add to killfile). It scaled badly with more people and spammers. Arguably it started going downhill 30 years ago. Found a decade old discussion:
This brings me to a Veritasium video of a few years back that I didn't quite understand at the time. [1]
The claim being made was that if you connected a light bulb to a switch, with 300'000 km of wire left and right, and if the switch and the light bulb were 1 m away, the light would turn on in 1/c seconds.
But this would imply that the information travel is not along the wires, but straight from the switch to the light bulb?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHIhgxav9LY
In theory the change in electric field will induce a small current in the other wire, and their magical science lamp turns on at any non-zero electricity. Whether the wires are connected or not at the far end doesn’t matter.
They never clarified how strong the other current would be.