And not only did this happen already over a decade ago, a lot of the current internet users have never known anything else.
We had a discussion with coworkers and somebody mentioned irc. Explaining to younger colleagues what it was and that it was not a product of a company, but operators had servers that formed a network, and it was more like infrastructure. Felt weird.
Isn't minecraft more decentralised than federated?
IRC networks usually have multiple servers connected together (historically, often run by a bunch of different people) and I didn't think people self-hosting minecraft servers usually did that?
I think honestly it highlights the power of marketing as much as anything else. In some ways, building an open network is always going to put you at a disadvantage to a company that can throw money at user acquisition and PR teams. That federated networks like Mastodon have seen growth reflects the fact that word of mouth still means something in 2022.
We had a discussion with coworkers and somebody mentioned irc. Explaining to younger colleagues what it was and that it was not a product of a company, but operators had servers that formed a network, and it was more like infrastructure. Felt weird.