The internet is great again, thanks to all of you 🙂
The internet is great again, thanks to all of you 🙂
I'm 32, I remember using the internet before google was a thing, discovering flashy websites, hanging out on all kinds of internet forums and chatrooms, ebaums world, MySpace, new grounds... I rember when YouTube was just starting off and it was exploding with all kinds of content.
I joined Facebook in 2005, I remember when it was the talk of the town, it used to actually kind of be decent, all the content was from actual real world peers.
I remember when pages became a thing, and you could like certain topics, and then eventually it unfolded into something enterely different, I remember when it became New Facebook, and there became a chatbar. And then eventually it became a cespool of garbage.
I remember when reddit was at it's prime, I discovered it in 2011, I spent hours scrolling and engaging in discussion. The content was always new and original, every day on Reddit my mind got blown by something, this is before all the algorithms, and when upvotes and down votes actually dictated where your post would be jn the feed. You could litterally refresh your page and watch your vote counts.
Since then I've watched it change, I could always tell something felt off about it over the past few years.
Everytime I would google something on the net on my phone and click a Reddit link, I would be prompted to install the app. I tried it and it was shit. Once upon a time I could just open Reddit is Fun through the browser. Reddit made it impossible to do that.
Since discovering this place a few weeks ago now, I have been hit with a familiar feeling, and that is I am actually enjoying my time here as much as I did on Reddit in the early 2010s.
The communities are more grounded, there is no bot activity, my big long posts aren't deleted after posting them due to shitty rules.
I like how it feels free, and everyone agrees to just follow the rules of the community and if the post isn't quite fitting, people can vote on that, as it should be.
Thank you all for restoring something that was once great, I really thought there was no chance in hell people would get away from those platforms. I always told people we need a new website, a new Reddit, and I guess this is it.
One of my favorite features of Lemmy is that there's an actual functional downvote button. So many platforms nowadays are removing the downvote button or straight up making it useless. I remember when YouTube used to have a proper downvote button and it made it so easy to tell when a vid was not good or clickbait. Even on Reddit, the downvote button just changes the total score but it doesn't actually show the number of downvotes. Being able to see the actual number of upvotes/downvotes is such a nice thing to see coming back.
Negative people are always saying we'll never see anything like the early internet again with how everything is owned by corporations, but this last week on Lemmy has come damn close for me! Time to go be nostalgic about asking A/S/L in AIM chatrooms while watching flash animations on https://joecartoon.com/ eh @CoffeeBlood91@lemmy.ca?
(I can't believe that site is still running!)
I'm 51. I started with BBS's, compuworld, Usenet and MUD telnet screens. I've seen access to the internet and pre internet go from 1,400 baud modems to 56,000 modems to the 5G internet access we have today.
To me, the fedeverse feels like a modern technology in development without corporations ruinous hands in it.
I really hope the corporate hold on social media is breaking, because they eventually ruined everything they touched in order to squeeze every last dollar out of it.
an accurate summation of my thoughts on the matter as well - the active communities (not the ones that get created because they were big on reddit but have no content here) are the ones I like - there's intriguing posts, insightful comments, actual conversation instead of toxic arguing.
lemmy is like a breath of fresh air.
I'm not saying Lemmy is going backwards, but I prefer this forum vibe I am experiencing here with people expressing their opinions and helping each other.
I have to say it does feel pretty cool and like the good old days. No big corporations at the moment, just people figuring stuff out and doing their own thing. I'm liking this a lot
It is my hope that we move past the era of Reddit's postmodern cynicism of powermods and personalized ad algorithms and tired attempt to try to sell things into an era of New Sincerity.
I hope we are witnessing the birth of the real Web 3.0 here. Blockchain being Web 3.0 was always a lie, because internet contents are ultimately interaction between of people, and not things or money.
Remember, what people like of the internet is engaging with other people. Content is secondary, outrage is clickbait to monetize ads. What we like aboud platforms is not the tech, but other humans.
It can't last. Right now, lemmy/ActivityPub is in the "early adopter" stage of the tech hype cycle. The only people here now are the people who are willing to try out something new. If there are enough "early adopters", Lemmy will become interesting, and then the normal people will follow. This would lead to an "eternal September" effect of declining quality. Then they're followed by the spammers and people looking to make a profit.
If basically feels like reinventing Usenet, with maybe some extra modern features.
There's one big weakness. There appears to be some sort of shared blocklist. If people wind up being placed on the list for petty reasons rather than genuine misbehavior, that could become a problem. I.e., the people maintaining the blocklist decide they disagree with X politically, and then X winds up on the blocklist even though they really weren't abusive. Then people running nodes are going to have to start manually reviewing the blocklist and making exceptions, which most people won't bother doing.
The internet was taken over by wall street. The fediverse is a revolt against that.
This is the better internet.
Remember when Facebook released a “friends and family update” that they said would take the site back closer to connecting you with real people? That was the moment they finally died. The fact that they had drifted from that showed they were actually pursuing something else the whole time. And the update barely made a difference, but they patted themselves on the back anyway and bragged that it even cost them some revenue but they felt it was right for users 😖
On Reddit I always felt like a raindrop in an ocean. I'm just one of way too many, and very little of what I wrote was ever seen or engaged with. That was discouraging at times, especially when I put plenty of thought or research into my reply, only for it to have no engagement while typical low-effort replies like "this!" Or "I'm a simple person I see x I updoot" always rise to the top. It was starting to feel like all the other social media I've quit over the years, and I was originally there because it felt like a forum, not social media. I'm on kbin now and I'm getting the feeling I got from posting on forums like Playstation Underground when I was younger. I even recognize user avatars across different threads and magazines/communities, which definitely reminds me of forums of old. Who knows what it will become but the federated nature of it means it can feel as big or small as I want it to, which is what is keeping me invested.
You moved me.
Well then, welcome to the Fediverse I guess :P
Get comfy, as Kbin and Lemmy aren't the only services part of the Fediverse. There's also Microblogging services like Mastodon, YouTube-like Video sharing through Peertube and even self-hosted streaming with OwnCast.
There's statistics on https://fedidb.org, on which there's also a list of instances/servers on all kinds of topics using all kinds of software.
We ain't corporate, we're a community.
I'm not old enough to remember the early internet, but I do feel like there's been a shift in how I interact with the internet in the last 6 months or so. Prior to that, most of my interaction was sanitized through the channels laid out by large corporations: twitter, instagram, etc.
While I still use those platforms to an extent, it feels as if it's become easier and easier to find interesting people and ideas that float below the broader internet waterline. They've certainly always been there, but I think it's indicative of some degree of rejection of oligarchic centralized platforms in favor of more democratic systems of interaction. It's early days, but the large platforms are showing their cracks and I think it's possible that more traffic could be diverted from them to places like Lemmy.
Personally, my problem with the more centralized platforms are that their adoption is so widespread that it becomes overwhelming to break in. So many opinions are flying around that it's impossible to engage in a meaningful way. The advantage of smaller platforms like Lemmy or kbin is that it's easier to engage and build community. As they grow, they'll have to figure out how to preserve that aspect, but I think their engineering provides an inherent advantage that other platforms lack.
Man this takes me back... I also remember the early days of the internet, browsing it on my dad's computer. I miss these dumb times.
Internet forums that were based on phpBB and other popular scripts were one of the best parts of the internet that Reddit and Facebook shamelessly killed with the applause of the netizens. Centralization of those forums was a huge regression and it felt like we went to a point that was worse than Web 1.0. I feel like Lemmy is a return of that forum culture that made the internet great.
You nailed just about everything that I've been enjoying about Lemmy, too!
To me, it's definitely reminiscent of reddit circa 2011-2012. There aren't any bots yet, so discussions feel more grounded; and it has a similar air of wonder to it, like people are still excited for both what the community is and what it can be.
...Except for the sorting. Sorting by Subscribed or Local feel reddit-ish, with the former being a self-curated feed and the latter being a broader discovery feed of whatever going on in your chosen instance. Sorting by All, though, feels a bit like stepping back to my old high-school 4chan days, but with less sharpies in buttholes.
It’s such a nice breath of fresh air that I really didn’t know I needed. But now, looking back, it’s so obvious things weren’t the way they should be. And here, in the fediverse, things feel like they are exactly how they should be! It’s so nice!
Definitely. This place is a (much needed) step back to what the internet used to be. Somewhere between 15-20 years ago and now, the online growth experienced obviously went in a wrong direction. I'm glad these huge social media conglomerations were a testing ground for us to discover how the web should not work, and Lemmy is a step in the right direction.
discovering flashy websites
To anyone interested in this, there's a thing called neocities.org
I posted a toot on Mastodon back in November during the whole Twitter fiasco saying how Mastodon in 2022 felt like Twitter did circa 2010. Same feeling for Lemmy / Kbin!
I definitely feel like the posts talking about Reddit here are few and far between. And guess what…? You don’t have to read them. But you do you.
Yeah, ever since I first arrived on kbin, I’ve felt like a breeze is passing through me. It took me a while to realize, but then it hit me: it’s because I’m not enraging Redditors every day by just opening my mouth.
Something isn't adding up here. 32? Joined Facebook in 2005? Facebook, until 2006, required a valid college (in the American sense) email address. Being 32 would put your high school graduation in the neighborhood of 2009. So did you go to college ~4 years early, sneak on, or do I have something wrong in my timeline?
I'm 29 and I completely share your vibes 😅
I'm much younger so I never really got to use these smaller forums, I grew up with a centralised and corporate internet where everyone used the same handful of websites. And then began the enshittification. All the sites I used started getting worse with every update so I stopped using them one by one, with the most recent one being reddit. Moving to the fediverse made me realise just how little I was actually enjoying those sites. I wasn't browsing them for content or for discussion, I was browsing them because I was addicted. Uninstalling the apps and deleting my accounts has done wonders for my mental health, and the smaller community here is so much nicer and more welcoming than the toxic ocean that is social media.
I grew up late to the early internet days as I am just about as old as google itself. However, even in my time I remember light saber mouse cursors, neo colored backgrounds, the stupid but adorable fairy animations all over myspace, and websites auto playing Queen songs. There was character that we put it as a community.
While I may not be the biggest fan of the flat design of the lemmy website and how clinical it all seems, the FOSS nature leads to so much customization with apps and so forth while the content y'all produce is absolutely magical. If I see an ad I know it's cause one of you have something unique to actually show off and it's not just bots pushing me to open my wallet. Thank you, you lovely bunch of adorable dufuses.