This excellent article by @molly0xfff reminded me of the sci-fi trope where everyone in the future lives in a domed bunker & gets told not to go outside because it's a wasteland filled with Bad People.
Of course the protagonists leave the dome & find that the reality is a bit different: outside can be scary, but it's not the hellscape they were told.
Big Tech walled gardens are the dome; outside them is a risky wonderland that’s ours for the taking.
Leave the dome.
https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/
Sheesh @molly0xfff this is beautiful!
I feel seen 
'If a tenant decided they were sick of their spot within a walled garden, well, they could leave — but it meant they abandoned what they had built, and the path for friends or admirers of their work to come visit them became a lot more arduous to traverse.'
I left the dome before it got built
@angusm @molly0xfff I love Molly, but this article didn't work for me. I quickly got lost among the metaphors.
I was hoping for some acknowledgement of the fact that most people like the walled gardens. They work better for those who don't chuckle at an apt hex code in a username. And unlike e.g. iOS v. Android, no one is trapped in any particular garden. You can join as many as you like.
Plus, there's some benefit to the Eternal September people having a place to go and just be people.
@jordan @angusm @molly0xfff They love the walled gardens just because they don’t know of the alternatives. Sure, the alternatives can be more complex, like driving your own car is harder than taking the bus. But that is basically what they are doing. They are the passengers, not the drivers.
@toriver @angusm @molly0xfff But the complexity is the problem for normies. You can't make a distributed, decentralized, permissionless system that beats the user experience of a centralized rival.
Don't get me wrong: I love the Fediverse, I self-host over a dozen services, I wrote an open source dashboard.
But I do that because I enjoy it. Most people don't. They just want to message friends, write docs, listen to music, all of which is so much easier in a "garden."
@angusm In which works is this trope featured?Yes, I don't like this word 'trope', it should be avoided, but still. I may enjoy reading about it some day soon.
@wing_of_eternity The theme of a ‘safe’ enclosed community vs. an unsafe outside world (and the idea that the rulers of the ‘safe’ enclave may not be telling the truth) can be found in “THX-1138”, “Logan’s Run”, the first episode of “Blake’s 7”, “Silo”, and the recent “Fallout”, to name only a few.
@angusm And to think that I didn't watch any of these yet. I was thinking more in terms of books. Even though I may not have the time to read them now.
@angusm @wing_of_eternity and also the “Solid State” album/graphic novel from Jonathan Coulton: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_State_(Jonathan_Coulton_album)
@angusm @molly0xfff That's why I'm here. SO much better (mostly). (And reasonably easily fixable.)
@angusm @molly0xfff BRILLIANT article, thanks
@angusm @molly0xfff I'm thinking of The Machine Stops, Logan's Run and THX1138. I think there are some current TV series that play with this as well?
@theohonohan “Fallout” and “Silo” fit the model. So does the first episode of “Blake’s 7”.
I’m sure I’ve encountered other examples.
It’s about security vs. liberty; the ‘utopian’ enclave society is always very controlling & often based on deceiving those inside about the possibility of alternatives (or the purpose/origin of the enclave).
I’d expect to find it in YA; the choice of the fertile wilderness vs. the sterile dome can be read as rejection of parental authority, a core YA theme.