The internet was already ruined. It’s no longer the same place it was in 2016 or 2010 or 2000. It’s become a corporate hellhole where you can’t get away from tracking, monitoring and other shady practices no matter what you do. Almost nothing is free and open and everything is designed to milk as much money out of the product.
AI is just accelerating this. Makes me think of the “old net” in Cyberpunk2077. Infested with rouge AI that have turned it into a battleground.
Even the non-commercial spaces are commercial. I’ve seen a bunch of thing disguised ads on here already. The fediverse is no different than the rest of the net. The big corps are still monitoring everything.
Every “nerd” I meet now wants out asap. The only ones who don’t seem to be pushing blockchain or AI. The tech sphere I loved is well and truly gone. The people are so profit driven nothing else can matter.
Even places like lemmy or mastodon aren't safe anymore. Everything that is public can be, and is, data mined by some corporation. There will be bot accounts or paid people pushing their agenda. And several other things.
It's not a technical problem. We can have places that are better than the average, but the corporations will still put their tentacles in.
2000 or 2010 maybe (too young to know) but I'm not sure I see any difference between now and 2016. The only major new thing I can think of is tiktok but it didn't ruin the internet.