If I may offer a new way to think about things - YouTube ads support creators by allowing them to make a living making their videos. It’s quite different than Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, where a company is just hosting and monetizing people discussing and sharing things with each other. If you want to see good content, YouTube decentralized alternatives will really only take off if there is some sort of crowd funding going to creators. Which would most likely take the form of a subscription. And…that is essentially YouTube premium anyway. And I might add that I’ve had YouTube premium for years and it’s my favorite subscription I have across the entire internet.

I might be pretty ignorant here but what is so proprietary about Twitter/Threads? It just lets people make public status updates and share photos. Unless they literally used the same lines of code, how is it infringement and trade secrets?

I think decentralized internet is probably the most legitimate sounding

I agree - what would you say those pitfalls are? Of course the decentralizing nature takes care of some problems - but the main thing that made me feel awful browsing reddit was the constant argumentative nature of every discussion. When I first discovered web forums 20 years ago it was the magical aspect of it that had me engaged. It was actually cool to be able to chat with other people online about anything - and that itself put everyone in a good mood; after all, why waste your time being really negative if you’re doing something cool and interesting? Now, it’s very common place. Added with people being more comfortable that they can remain anonymous, huge sites like Reddit are prone to a lot of…crap. That’s what I can think of so far.

And yet Apollo was made by one guy and it’s far better than anything Reddit made

That’s sort of what I feel like this is - or at least that’s what I’ve felt from browsing Lemmy. No ads and no ragebait/doomscrolling. There’s nothing requiring that I stay engaged - in a way it’s almost respectful of my interests and time.

I think he would be more interested in covering the Reddit story - he is the internet historian after all.