My impression is that it hasn't been users that have pushed everything into apps, it's been publishers. This is all a part of a general trend where software has become much less about what it can do for the user, and much more about what data it can extract from a user for the publisher. Websites generally have a lot more protections against such data scraping, meanwhile you can put who knows what code into an app.

If you look at how RSS fell from use, there were two major issues. On the user side, users had to go out to find content as there wasn't an inherent way to search for content within the system. On the creator side, creators had to deal with advertising themselves to users and they had to handle the monetization by themselves.

Social media created the algorithm to find content and developed some revenue sharing with creators.

If federated media takes off, it will probably look like Threads or Truth Social, where control of a front end monetizes development of the platform.

OT, but most of my students in their 20s can barely use keyboards. It really stresses them out and they get mad about it. Papers are either copy-paste then AI filtered a few times, or speech-to-text with a quick grammerly scan. Drives me bonkers too. Just to say, I'm sorry your work isn't appreciated.

"The Digital Native generation are technological geniuses because they can usually intuit which icon to click. Let us praise them and give them as much screentime as we can." - All the news pieces and academic articles from 2000-2010ish