Melbourne

I was an occasional fanatical Redditor but mostly lurker these days, but am a very active Fedi user, and have watched the #Rexxit with interest.

What was it even for? Hopefully to wake some people up: this is just going to keep happening in any online space that is owned by a company expecting to make a profit from the free labour of its users. It feels really shitty to watch people retreat and succumb, go back to the familiar, to those places and people you know. The powerful people pulling the strings are actually betting on that being the majority.

It's been handled more obviously or more stealthily in different spaces, but it is inevitable, and while the Fediverse is clunky and doesn't have the same resources as profit driven entities, it grows in spurts and won't suffer the same fate, even with the arrival of bigger entities, once it is clear enough people have woken up and won't give their social graph and intellectual and emotional labour to them for free anymore).

Email, while "captured" in many ways early on by Hotmail, then later Gmail, continues to function and new players continue to arrive (eg ProtonMail) because the protocols remain open to all.

Leaving walled gardens like Reddit and Twitter and returning to the open, interconnected Internet is the only sustainable path in the long term.

I hope many of you stay =)