Hello 'Verse! I'm new here.
What a charming world you got here!
Even though I was quite young during the early days of internet, I still vividly remember.
The days would be marked with encountering webpages with the spirit of DIY and 'improper' formatting, which went against the 'Swiss' idea of design that was widely prevalent in corporate and government identities. Of course, we know this was primarily due to technological and bandwidth limitations, but internet as we know it today didn't exist back then.
But what it lacked in discipline, made it up with its spirit. It felt like a new frontier, ads were still in their infancy. The grip of corporations and world-wide brands were not all encompassing yet. Most of all the web didn't look like needlessly gentrified.
This is evidenced by the presence of so many quaint and idiosyncratic blogs, websites and personal business sites. In fact, in my experience people treated websites as a place of personal expression rather than business as the opportunities were still not realised and most people in the world didn't have access to the internet.
Even a trinket shop site bore the essence of hobbyists and curio collectors!
Needless to say, I admire what Multiverse is trying to do. I have not felt enthused and eager to share my thoughts on a platform for a long time now. The absence of ads, subscriptions, product pushers, stories, and everything else which turns our .NET experience akin to facing peak traffic in Delhi seems to be not present here.
The problem is not that whether those things are inherently good or bad. But that these occupy a significant area of the internet and have a lot of influence. Since companies/individuals are buying digital spaces for placing their ads, we are denied our footing and room to express ourselves without interruptions.
Perhaps it the fact that even individuals and anyone (even scammers) can post ads, often appropriating meme culture, something which developed as an open culture, owned (both in terms of content and context) by public rather than companies, is what makes us feel distanced. In fact, this leads to snowballing, as a specific song made to go viral, is used everywhere, even if contextually it might not be correct or meaningful in any way.
The apps we use promote this. For example, Instagram will prompt you to use a song that's going viral in your reels. The problem is now there's no guarantee that is organically popular or boosted and frankly speaking giving incentives to people for using the song is actually taking away the meaning of choice. I mean if you want your content to be seen wouldn't you be tempted to use them?
Multiverse seems to give a place to be ourselves again.
No anxiety feeds, no infinity scrolls, no story bubbles and with it no natural comparison. If there is no reward for a specific format or content, then everything becomes equal. Apart from the primary need to design for readability of course! Ha ha! Until next time :)