social.tchncs.de is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A friendly server from Germany – which tends to attract techy people, but welcomes everybody. This is one of the oldest Mastodon instances.

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@dfr Well..... I agree with a lot of what has been written there. But ... was the internet really *ever* a democratic thing or something about creation, creativity, ...? Was it ever "free", and what does "free" mean? Gratis (which is what brought us ad- and tracking based capitalism in the first place)? I thin we also should be honest to ourselves and try to understand how we got here before trying to figure out how to fix things...

@z428 this is personal opinion, but: I think democracy came with the lack of centralization and open access for those privileged enough to have access to it. Also I think it means free as in freedom, because companies always charged you to access to the internet from your landline, etc. I guess traffic was never free, but use was. It's an opinionated article but still has good points.

Kristian

@dfr Well, I partially agree, but "privilege" is a good starting point. From what I see, the "internet of creation" indeed was an internet of the "privileged few" who both could afford access to it and were skilled enough to use it. In a sinister way, the current tech companies did a really (no sarcasm here) great job in making digital technology and all of its means of communication, expression, creativity, ... affordable and easily available to a vast load of people who aren't ...