"But again, what's the alternative?" Blockhain based social networks would seem the obvious choice. The onramp needs to be easier I feel though. Make the ID-management, posting and global searching easy enough.
A free topic-exploration tool based on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Archive.org, OpenAlex and other datasources. AI-based search and chat are also supported now (enter a locally stored OpenAI key).
I think the future holds a synthesis of LLM functions with semantic entities and logic from knowledge graphs (this is called "neuro-symbolic AI"), so each topic/object can have a clear context, upon which you can start prompting the AI for the preferred action/intention.
On Conzept one or more bookmarks you create, can be used in various LLM functions. One of the next steps is to integrate a local WebGPU-based frontend LLM, and see what 'free' prompting can unlock.
JSON-LD is also created dynamically for each topic, based on Wikidata data, to set the page metadata.
Encarta was a big inspiration for my Conzept project (https://conze.pt) - a topic exploration system based on Wikipedia, Wikidata and other (pluggable) datasources.
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I'm creating an encyclopedia based on Wikipedia, Wikidata, YouTube and many other sources of information. For each of the millions of topics in a language-wiki, the software renders a "topic card" with thematic sections, each containing links to other content. Link: https://conze.pt