I was afraid I had become too cynical to find excitement in technology again. It wasn’t true.

While I’ve grown more cynical about much of tech, movements like the Indieweb and the Fediverse remind me that the ideals I once loved, and that spirit of the early web, aren’t lost. They’re evolving, just like everything else.

At a certain point, every technology reaches a point where its advancement slows down, if not stalls outright. We don’t expect our refrigerators to significantly change every few years, and our cars and laptops have been in that incremental stage for a long time. The shift to electric motors or ARM processors brought some changes and improvements to the core product, but they don’t fundamentally change what a car or a laptop is at the end of the day. Smartphones reached that stage years ago, but for some reason there’s a vocal group of people who don’t want to accept it.