The last part is happening. A lot of people switched to gogs/gitea/forgejo instances like codeberg when GH pulled a copilot on them. Lemmy went from being an obscure platform to a good one with lots of new users, better codebase and loads of clients when Reddit screwed its users. Mastodon was already healthy, but ballooned in size when twitter was trashed by Musk. YouTube is the only platform standing without a viable alternative, but people are trying after their adblock shenanigans.

Are the big proprietary platforms dead yet? No. Did they lose the audience - only a little bit. But it has made the alternative open platforms healthy and stronger. We are no longer in a condition where big platforms can just screw their users knowing that nothing will happen to them. Each transgression will cause more and more people to migrate. That’s a good thing.

Because for them, it’s exhausting. If you’re a regular person who thinks of a computer as an appliance and you’ve learned how to use it by memorizing steps (click here, click that, that makes The Excel open) instead of understanding the system as a whole, you’re starting from so far behind the curve it would be like asking them to take a few semesters of night classes at a community college just to understand how this shit even works, let alone what to do about it. Fuck, I get tired of it, and I’m at least literate in the domain.

Imagine trying to teach any exhausted mom or pop what a “cookie” even is at the end of a workday. Or to explain to someone why the social site they use to share pictures of their kids is evil. Or how that same social site puts an invisible dot on your computer that spies on you. Or why it’s really not in their best interest to have ads show them stuff they genuinely like. You’ll sound crazy! Absolutely paranoid. Facebook hasn’t come to my house with guns! Jesus! Now let me get back to the “news” here about how the other political party drinks blood from children.

Even if you got them to wake up, so to speak, what are they going to do? Are the same kind of people that loved the cute purple gorilla Bonzi Buddy and thought it was normal to have 17 toolbars in Internet Explorer – are they really going to be just fine moving to Ubuntu? They’ll throw the whole machine in the trash the first time they need to call their ISP and get told “we don’t officially support Linux”. They’ll return it to the store as broken when their new printer doesn’t automatically work. (What the fuck is CUPS?)

Throwing it all in the trash Ron Swanson-style is the other option – maybe a better one – except it isn’t an option at all. Because the web is so integral to doing any kind of business or banking now that you can’t just go full Walden Pond and function in society.