Tom Eastman posted this back in 2018:
Screenshot of a tweet from Tom Eastman posted on 4 December 2018 that reads “I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four”.
He’s not wrong, and I get the point he’s trying to make: the internet is full of walled gardens and, by design, it’s difficult to talk across the boundaries.
But a few thousand years ago this could’ve been someone complaining that their valley is a group of five villages, each consisting of people telling stories they heard in the other four.
So while, yes, it is shitty that there isn’t more interoperability across social networks, I think it’s beautiful that humans love sharing stories they’ve seen and heard elsewhere with their own tribes — and that we’ll continue to do so, no matter what walls people build around us for their own financial benefit.