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It's interesting to think of the concept of the "free and open web" as a generational thing. I can't imagine that that phrase means much to someone born in Generation Z, who grew up with "the internet" meaning an array of chiclet-sized apps built by companies in Silicon Valley.

Feels weird to see myself as an old fogey pining for the days of MySpace and Neopets, when people made their own web pages with garish colors and backgrounds, and to know that younger folks today probably have no frame of reference for what I'm talking about.

I think this also comes up when trying to explain Mastodon or the fediverse to a wider audience. They just have no frame of reference for this kind of stuff. "Where's the app in the App Store?" "Why do I have to choose an instance?" "What the heck's an instance?"

It's just expected that Mastodon is a startup in California somewhere, and it's got millions of dollars of VC money and bus ads saying "get it on the App Store, get it on Google Play." How could things possibly be anyway else?

@nolan isn't it like choosing a Minecraft server to play on?

@sil @nolan I think the email analogy is a better fit but as Gmail subsumes more and more of the market, that analogy loses its relevance

Stuart Langridge

@nick @nolan yup. It was pointed out well down in that thread that a lot of people don't like email, and making comparisons to it does not help your argument. Which is reasonable, although depressing.