A certain class of idealists definitely feel this way, and it's why many decentralized efforts are fragile and fall apart. Because they can't meaningfully construct something without centralization or owners, they end up just hiding these things under a blanket rather than acknowledging them as design elements that require an intentional specification.

I think it's worth emphasizing that the biggest change between that idealized Internet and today's adware hell wasn't any technological change but a massive shift in who was using the internet, how, and why. The technological changes that led off of that were largely attempts to meet the needs of this new audience, and they largely did not have the technical skills to do their own administrative work and didn't have any interest in doing so anyways. That user base effectively requires some level of centralization, and since those centralized entities are explicitly about offloading the technical work of being online they are (in our current economic system) going to end up being primarily profit-driven as a way of ensuring the people who do that work are compensated. From there the advertising model of monetization has the distinct advantage of not making those users pay you anything because even though they're the product rather than the buyer it's really easy to sell something that's free. Social media completes the loop by giving those users tools not just to consume information without having to think about how it's done to letting them create their own online spaces and share their own work with each other, meaning that you no longer need to know even HTML or what a "server" is in order to fully take advantage of the internet.

Google and Facebook aren't the product of a sinister conspiracy trying to control the internet in order to push a woke ideology down the throats of an unwilling populace. Instead, they created services that streamline and moderate user's access to online information and nobody appears to have realized how much actual power that gave them over people's access to information (and by information I increasingly mean "the whole world") until they had already become economically dependent on selling that influence machine to the highest bidder in the form of advertising. All the technologies that enable the modern intermet and the associated problems and centralization on problematic platforms and companies were created in an attempt to meet the needs of users without any consideration for the kinds of social and economic structures that were embedded in those technological structures.

Zuckerberg and friends aren't evil geniuses who need to be stopped by a plucky band of good guys, they're a bunch of amoral idiots who have gained incredible personal wealth by stepping into a powerful role that was made systemically necessary without any consideration for who was going to fill it, and now we need to solve the problems of both how that power should be used by who and of how that power can be wrested from the hands of the people who have proven themselves categorically incapable or unwilling to use it responsibly but are making too much money to let go voluntarily.

Fair points, I guess. When I speak of advertising, I meant specifically that "ad-tech-driven surveillance economy", not the ability to post (or spam) your product down any given channel. I should have said targeted advertising specifically.

People who remember Usenet fondly either only hung out in the good parts (heavily moderated technical newsgroups) or are perfectly fine with defining online discourse as being text-only and gated by access.

I guess I am in that bubble, yes. I remember Usenet mostly as being rather heavily moderated as I mostly stayed away from the scary parts of the alt. hierarchy (esp. alt.binaries), and most of my interactions were with creative communities in the form of writing and fan-fiction on rec, as well as what I perceived as early safe spaces for discussions of LGBTQ issues on soc (especially SSYGLB). There were also some groups in my native language that catered to both of these interests in some of the language hierarchies outside of the Big 8.

But I suppose it's the same romanticized idea that Gemini follows and only appeals to me because I have somewhat positive memories. Idk, I guess I'm just kinda fed up with the modern internet, especially because I also see a lot of that ad-tech crap at work which doesn't leave me with a lot of hope that it won't get worse.

The notion of “professional moderator” should perhaps ring some alarm bells. Sure, some people will be good at that sort of things, but:

• being a moderator can be stressful or even traumatic, depending on the sorts of stuff your site is subjected to. Mods must take breaks from time to time, and modding several sites at once to pay rent seems like a route to a mental health disaster.
• mods opinions should broadly reflect the ethos of the site and at least some portion of its user base. Selecting mods from that user base is one way to do this… finding non-users who don’t need time to get up to speed with the local situation seems challenging, unless you’re running a very generic bland corporate platform.
• ACAB. People who seek out mod powers should be given a good deal of side eye. Assholes lurrrve positions of power and authority, asshole mods wreck communities, and finding non-assholes in good mental health who have the time and are prepared do the often unpleasant task of moderating your community seems challenging.

treehouse.systems had a nice thread recently about their modding arrangement, but I can’t find a handy link to it right now.

I don't know what a co-op is, but I see the moderation system at BlueSky and think if that can be generalized then maybe that is the answer to a lot of centralization problems. So a node representing a peer can do basically anything that node operator/peer wishes including delegating his node operation to another node or a quorum of node. And if the peer wishes so, they could also take their node back anytime. For example in communication, we already have decentralized web of trust from PGP or other Public Key Infrastructure.