They do need a legal framework for their actions, so things definitely takes time - and perhaps sometimes to much time to be really effective. Also, there are misguided efforts like the age verification system, that most likely first came from a good place, and then was warped by political interests from bad actors.

I think this sums up the two sides pretty well, actually. You can either have things happening at a slow pace (but then be pretty well debated and thought through), or happening at a faster pace but be done haphazardly in some cases.

Balance is key here, and while I'm not exactly one to make excuses for politicians, I also do understand, that what might seem obvious to someone who live and breathe the open web, it's not necessarily the case for someone who does not.

Well, some lawmakers definitely DO make it expensive for tech companies to break the law:

https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/12/17/eu-takes-on-big-tech-here-are-the-top-actions-regulators-have-taken-in-2025

No, not the US lawmakers, I get that - but there are other lawmakers in the world...

This situation is only inevitable if we believe widespread corruption is inevitable. It is not a coincidence that this is happening in a period where fascism is coming back.

I agree though that linking to other places on the web, specifically other indie sites has become more and more crucial to keeping the web healthy.

I do what I can I think

Cottagecore dark web.

Might be federated, not sure.

Thank you for writing this.

One example: I’ve created an online tool for teaching myself Portuguese. I’ve spent 100s of hours writing code, building vocabulary lists, have professionally recorded ~20k audio clips, and my biggest fear is that an AI gets hold of a link and starts downloading the clips millions of times, blowing up my costs. So I turned off account creation and don’t let anyone else in. I would love to share, but I don’t know how to do so safely.

I have mixed feelings though. I Ioved the early internet. I'm still here, on Mastodon, because it represents the open web that has meant so much to me.

But I think there is a "tragedy of the commons" problem. It may not be possible to have an economy of sharing freely because there will always be people who take greedily. Who overgraze the commons with their own sheep. Who take all the candy in the "take one" bowl.

I feel weird about knowing that the content I share here on Mastodon is probably being scraped by not one but HUNDREDS of LLMs.

And I'm not sure there is any way to stop them while keeping the web open. The only way to stop someone else from overgrazing our grass may be to fence in the grass and mark it as OURS.

Maybe the open web was always a beautiful doomed dream, because of human nature.