Sometimes great ideas come before their time, and they fade into obscurity because they were launched too soon, only for the same ideas to be resurrected years and sometimes even decades later when the time was right.
I think we have a similar situation with Zot, Zap, and Hubzilla, except we are lucky enough that the maintainers of these projects did not abandon their work, and it still lives on today.
The internet was very different decades ago. Before social media took over the internet, conversations and communities were much more decentralized. You had Usenet groups where anyone with an email address could join the discussions. You had forums, also known as discussion boards, that people joined and communicated on. You had many independently run communities that filled every niche.
But then the social media platforms arrived and made it easy for the masses to participate. And then once they got big enough, the "network effect" kicked in, where you felt compelled to join because a lot of people you knew joined as well. They grew into these massive centralized closed networks.
Now, we have realized that there is a cost to excessive centralization, both at the government level and the corporate level. Those who want to control speech take advantage of the centralization of these social media platforms, and try to censor or suppress speech they don't like. This is especially the case in countries run by dictators and oppressive regimes. Not to mention the pressure from the masses to censor or suppress anyone who thinks differently than they do. And then you have the excessive ads, the tracking, and the selling of your personal data. Centralized social media gave us many benefits, but it also comes with a cost.
Many people have been warning about this for years, but people are starting to wake up. And that is why the time is right for decentralized social media and nomadic identity. People are starting to wake up to the fact that they don't have control of their own identity online. And Zot, Zap, and Hubzilla change that.
The time is now.
