Anyone that thinks of today's #Fedi as some kind of watershed moment in history is a revisionist.

imagine, people in the 1990s were using almost the exact same software, bikeshedding about the exact same stuff; guidelines, governance, privacy, who to federate with, and what the politics were, etc.

the browser wasn't better than most BBS clients. In fact, it was a bit worse. But the single thing that made the browser better was, it was totally permissionless, no login, you just needed a url, and boom, you got what you wanted, that might link to other things, and you could just visit those things, holy shit, this was amazing, it was the real Wild West of the internet.

as soon as "Web 2.0", "the read-write" web came along, thing started to change. Everything needed to be guarded and gated. Because client-server was (and still is) an incredibly vulnerable design.