The state of the internet today - 26/04/26
We are honestly dealing with a rather chaotic internet, don’t think we can deny that. Not only are we facing the US ending section 230 which would damage the global internet unless something drastic is done, but the advent of age verification laws are bringing a rather worrisome state of surveillance for what used to be a place of anonymity, one that allowed many types of people to flourished precisely because of the anonymity provided some level of protection.
And besides that if you deal with NSFW topics you are at the whims of payment processors but also the vaguest and most easily abused set of rules you can imagine.
But at the same time the Indie web is becoming more of a thing, social media hegemony over the internet is showing true fractures.
And it just something that fills me with the same amount of dread as hope.
Because we have no real basis for what is to come, it’s not going to be a return to the 00s wild west era of the internet.
I want to be hopeful, but I can’t avoid worrying about how this will affect things like mutual aid and marginalized groups like myself.
I can’t deny that I have literally depended on the internet to survive for the past 6 years, specially the last 2. As the arts have come to heavier and heavier attack and devaluation. While also becoming increasingly harder for someone disabled, Latin American and trans to get any sort of job on the mainstream part of the industry.
A fractured net makes mutual aid much harder.
But at the same time, could it lead to a less content based view towards art? Like without social media hegemony (Not meaning without SM all together), perhaps the desire to have a constant stream of new art that you consume in seconds could end.
Deviant art used to have a somewhat slower pace for art, I feel back in it’s golden days artist didn’t felt like they were forced to be active daily or risk losing their livelihood.
But at the same time DA had the problem with discoverability, if you were new getting your work view took a lot of work and understanding how the site worked.
A similar worry goes for news, we already are dealing in an era of truly the lowest trust towards journalism, and honestly it’s not unwarranted, specially among minorities who at this point have a right to view their relationship with the industry as nothing more than antagonistic.
Gods know I’m rather skeptical towards most journalists nowdays, after seeing even a good share of supposed progressive ones engage of rather bad faith transphobia, double down and lead to massive harassment campaigns towards trans people on BSKY.
I do think part of the toxicity, from both sides comes from how on edge everyone is at the state of the world. But also it comes from how often marginalized people feel rather ignored by the journalistic industry then add the many cases of said industry actively being used as a weapon against said groups… no wonder this causes such friction compared to any other two groups.
But still, we kinda need to be informed, and the combination of the few good journalists out there and people on the field doing their best to inform on their own has done amazing work at giving out the truth in an era where most big corporate news agency have truly let everyone down.
So losing social media could lead to we losing access to important information that is imperative to fighting the rise of authoritarianism world wide.
Like think how without social media independent journalism we probably would be completely on the dark about the middle east, Minnesota, Ukraine, the state of Trans Rights.
Without the few good journalist in social media, the story about the UK government covering up trans youth suicide numbers ( Link to Good Law Project report on it.) would had been buried.
And I think a fully decentralized but more easily surveilled net would make information access harder.
That is not even counting on the massive issue that is US payment processors hegemony for international banking and how they are seeing this as the best time to sped up their puritan demands and how quickly those get inline with things like Project 2025.
To the point that it’s really already not even targeting purely porn, but queer topics in general.
My game has dark themes towards childhood parental abuse, trauma, queer themes, gore. Hell it’s a horror game very inspired by Signalis and Silent Hill and I’m worrying daily about if I’m even going to be able to sell it in the first place by the time I’m done working on it.
That is without mentioning my other works, Crow of Prey has some body horror, more queer themes and general horror elements.
So I have to worry about Patreon perhaps feeling motivated to target horror next as they have targeted porn so hard in the past decade.
Doesn’t mean everything is lost tho. We have seen some of these things lose in several US states, it’s been proved that it’s truly an unpopular move which is giving paused to some politicians, hell AOC in the US actively talked against them loudly not long ago.
We can’t lose hope, if anything this is the time we must look, with how fragile the internet is at this moment, what is the type of net we want to create for the future.
I for one don’t think we need to get rid of social media, just make it less central from the internet. We need sites that kids and teens can use for themselves that are also safe, bring back young spaces for kids online, be it the equivalent of flash games, club penguin, adventure quest, you name it.
And we need to yank the current desire to stick it to corporations away from harmful actions like age verification and move it towards what will really make social media sites much less toxic and harmful.
I’ve made it quite evident on BSKY what I believe are the true ways to make social media corporations be less harmful.
-Make Infinite Scroll and Autoplay at most a toggleable feature that is default off, but ideally just not have them at all.
-Stronger data privacy laws, we must give corporations less of our data, not more.
-Force the main feeds of websites to be chronological and based on followers with no promoted content. Allow secondary feeds to be algorithmic based but keep them regulated against harm.
-Implement a minimum based requirement of moderation tools for users, blocks, blocklists, detached quotes, mute and more features that allow people to curate their experience better and more easily deal with toxicity online.
-Bring back computer and online classes, seriously people we had them for like a few Millenials and Gen Z and suddenly people thought kids came out of the womb already knowing how to use tech, no, actually tech kids how to use computers and how to be safe online.