It once had that free-for-all atmosphere. You could search for anything, bring it right up right away, read it, all strings free. But that's changing. Fast. In 2025, more and more sites are putting up barriers—paywalls, passwords, and restricted access. More and more, “the open internet” becomes more and more a collection of walled-off sites,…

Social media's getting strange. Twitter (now X), Reddit, and Facebook, the titans of yesteryear, are no longer what they used to be. Everybody's frustrated. And they're going elsewhere. But what's distinct about 2025 is that there are fewer jumping straight to some other dominant platform, but instead thinking about decentralized social networks. Mastodon, Bluesky, Lemmy,…