> The internet exists beyond these walled gardens.
Barely. The amount of content that is locked in Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and Co. is enormous and I have never managed to find anything that can remotely compete with them. Worse yet, most alternatives are just clones of those services, they don't really change anything fundamentally. If they would ever get successful, they would go down the very same path. See imgur, which started as an image-sharing-but-good site and is now just another site trying to force you into their mobile app.
At this point I think the only way to solve this is legislation that forces those companies to open up the data and not wall it away. GDPR already did that for users personal data. The upcoming Digital Markets Act will force messaging services to interact with each other and maybe the walled gardens will be the next target.
I agree with you about content but maybe disagree about the cure. Legislation might not hurt, but if an alternative became popular that was more or less a clone, except it was federated or decentralized, it would also be enough.
The "regular" web and email get a lot of criticism for various things, but they can be thought of as federated platforms people adopted. They're the glue that makes these other things usable.
I'm not advocating for anything in particular, but if you could get enough people to start using a federated alternative, I think it would be enough.
Barely. The amount of content that is locked in Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and Co. is enormous and I have never managed to find anything that can remotely compete with them. Worse yet, most alternatives are just clones of those services, they don't really change anything fundamentally. If they would ever get successful, they would go down the very same path. See imgur, which started as an image-sharing-but-good site and is now just another site trying to force you into their mobile app.
At this point I think the only way to solve this is legislation that forces those companies to open up the data and not wall it away. GDPR already did that for users personal data. The upcoming Digital Markets Act will force messaging services to interact with each other and maybe the walled gardens will be the next target.