The "Good" Internet

In the past, I've been negative about the prospects of the world moving to decentralised social media platforms. The average person doesn't care if their data is being misused or locked in. Not enough to leave at least, they just want to have a good time.

But I've always believed in the fundamental principles of decentralised platforms and what they offer. It's better if platforms allowed you to control your data and take it anywhere.

In the last few years, the motivations to switch platforms have grown. We've seen Twitter be perverted by Elon Musk into a tool for his political agenda. Facebook has rolled back the fact checkers it added after the website was credibly linked to genocide in Myanmar. TikTok is now blatantly spreading propaganda for Trump and who knows who will own it in the coming months.

I've shared how I believe Bluesky is the best bet for a Twitter alternative. But social media is just one part of the equation.

The "Good" Internet

The internet itself has been appropriated by mega-corporations and their billionaire owners. This was easy to look past when they provided great free services and we paid with our data. But they've shown now that they're ready to use their power to serve their interests and hurt the services they provide us in the process because they know we're so dependent on them.

Google's search engine can control whether businesses live or die, but now they're ready to decrease the traffic they give you for half-baked A.I. responses.

Many people get their news from social media, but they're willing to tweak their algorithms to push the news stories they think you should see.

Content creators rely on YouTube and TikTok for income, but algorithm changes can kill their livelihood in a moment.

We need alternatives for all of these. Alternatives that are not VC-funded. Alternatives that don't lock you in.

There are lots of services already that fit this criteria that we already use. I call these services the "good internet". They are services with significant userbases that provide value but are not solely driven by profits. They might be open-source, they might be decentralised, they might be a non-profit, or they might even require a subscription, but they all have their incentives aligned with making the best product and not artificially locking you in.

Services like Wikipedia, Firefox, Ghost, and Signal. They all provide internet utilities but are not profit driven. None of these organisations are perfect but their structures allow the value they (and you) create to be widely shared and not concentrated in the hands of a few.

We need more of them. But they need to generate money to survive.

Who's Paying and How?

Too many have rely on donations, but like Mozilla, can find themselves in a precarious position if the donations mainly come from their rivals.

We need a business model for the "good" internet where the incentives align with the values we believe are most important. Ad networks incentivise an attention economy that leads to low quality content and bad user experiences. Sponsorships are better but harder to scale.

Subscription services have become normalized and it's a much easier sell when it's coming from a part of the "good internet". Adobe switching its expensive software to a yearly subscription feels scummy. But a news site like The Verge offering a subscription feels better because if you enjoy their work, you want to directly show support. It's like buying merch from your favourite artists.

But I think there is a need for something else too. Brave had an interesting idea with its automated payments system. You would fund your wallet and it would be distributed automatically to the websites you interacted with the most.

Maybe we can build something similar, minus the crypto. Imagine a service that worked across browsers and told websites you were a paying user and should have access to their premium features.

But Still Free

Preserving the free internet is important though. At its best it has empowered the masses and given everyone access to all of human knowledge. I don't believe in paywalls everywhere but those who can pay should pay.

Will it be enough to make the internet as profitable as it is today? Probably not. And maybe there's no way to make the internet both good and profitable. Financial incentives can always be misaligned and lead to bad outcomes.

But there are real costs to developing and hosting. Could we make hosting cheaper? So then it's only the costs of developers? It reminds me of HBO's Silicon Valley breakthrough compression algorithm and decentralised internet hosted on our existing devices. That does seem perfect.

We just need someone to invent middle out.