Ask Lemmy

Small forums always did exist and always will exist. That cannot and will not change

Social media is just a symptom of the larger problem which is the corporations prefering to build walled gardens so they can control users rather than the open protocols that defined the early internet. Back in the day, I used to call it "everything becoming facebook".

Social media is fundamentally a moat - a wall built around a set of consumers to keep them away from competitors. Investors love moats. If you whisper as quietly as you possibly can to yourself "I found a company with a wide moat that no one is talking about yet" JP Morgan himself will literally burst through your wall like the Kool Aid Man. They love it because it avoids competition, and as much as competition is the whole point of capitalism, it's the last thing an actual capitalist wants to deal with.

A big part of what made the early internet super valuable was the opposite of moats: open protocols. For example how GMail can send email to Yahoo or any other email provider. If Google had their way, that's not how email would work at all - you'd need a google account to both send and receive emails. That's why these companies have been trying to kill email for ages, trying to get people to use their own proprietary messaging systems instead, where you can only send to others with an account. Then they could capture you and keep you all to themselves.

Which brings us to the fediverse. The fediverse is an attempt to return to open protocols rather than creating a moat around a group of users. In many ways it's like email - your email provider might cut off a server if it's just sending spam all day, and this is basically defederation. But otherwise nothing stops you from communicating with anyone, and that's how it should be.

"social media" as buzzword (scientific speech, scientific image) and "social media" as political violence (commercial speech, manifest image) are two different beasts under the empire of law.

I like very much the comparison you made of a rural exodus; inspiring!

Algorithm curated content driven by engagement doesn't deserve to be called social media any more. The Feed, seems apropriate, malnourishing as it is.

Most people aren't made for the internet.

Most people can't handle the type of information. Most people fall for rage-bait, hate-inducing, right-wing propaganda.

We need to find a way to make the internet a thing where there's only people on it who actually want to use the internet in a healthy way.

One way to do this is to say no to commercialized parts of the internet. Say no to all commercial platforms selling ads or selling your data. These are full of rage-bait and only attract the worst in humans.

Throughout history, every village had one idiot, two max. And maybe one psycho.

Today thanks to the power of the internet these idiots and those psychos can unite and create big communities and represent a strong unified force in the world.

It's clear, but I have the impression they were abandoned in favor of social networks...

Yes. I'm a big fan of lemmy. I hope peertube gets going I feel it will be like the original YouTube

You're probably not the only one.

However, the interest (on Lemmy-aligned circles at least) in self-hosting, reducing depedence on large tech companies, community building on smaller scale online and offline, has me excited again that the smaller counterculture can co-exist with the mainstream profit-motivated social media culture.

It's not destroyed, it's just no longer dominant.

This has been the majority take since like 2015 or so. It’s very eternal September-adjacent as well, in that everybody thinks their vision of the Internet is the correct one and everyone else is a poser or just wrong and ruining it for them.

Social media brought all the normies into the internet. Normies ruin everything.

I think you're confusing social media and late stage capitalism. Social media hasn't done anything to anyone, capitalism has used social media to further its own ends.

I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.

Welcome :)

It’s a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I’ve noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.

This a very interesting metaphor, real spot on.

But I would say a lot of that rural Internet has not disappeared, not yet. It's still there, very much alive. People are simply not visiting it anymore. They don't dare go outside the pretty walled-gardens they're used to.

But those people wanting to stay parked in their corporate-owned gardens, or silos, doesn't make that small and more humane web go away. And would they chose to, they could still come visit it freely, they could still easily interact with their creators. They could even create and tend to their very own part of it, making that small Web a richer place.

They just don't do it. Most of the time because they can't be bothered with doing the actual work, or because they're afraid to try and to fail. They want to be fed easy to eat content, not learn to cook it themselves.

They want the a Web that is like those shitty fast-food serving standardized and over-processed industrial food. Something ready to eat that is barely food at all but that will stuff their belly and, more importantly, that will never surprise them. Alas, this food is as much a poison for their head as it is for their body. They will realize that too late. It probably already is.

Too bad, because the alternative is still a thing, not that far away.

The small web is still a thing. Many blogs still exist that only share content their author sincerely care about or is interested in, that are ads and tracking free, that respect their readers... But the majority of people have quit visiting them, they simply don't go outside of, say, YT, X, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok or whatever where they can all stay together parked like the cattle they have not yet realized they have become.

Back to your original metaphor. Digital rurality is still there and many could easily own a small part of it and make it exwactly like they want it to be, and be happy with it. But they prefer staying in the large over-crowed cities, in small overpriced apartments like most their friends are doing.

Lemmy is a great alternative to reddit but it could relatively easily become another silos—just plural and not corporate-owned but silos nonetheless. It's up to us to keep it open to the alternatives. I mean, sometimes I feel sad to see little posts & comments inviting people to go read/watch something they liked that is not already hosted on some corporate-owned platform. Heck, sharing personal content feels so much like a lost cause to me that I seldom share a link to my own blog posts: why bother? I also publish a lot less often than I used to, here again: why bother?

I'm not old enough to have known the old internet, but the photo- and video-based social media never felt attractive to me. The only social media that I used was Reddit, but now I'm here. I appreciate the genuine people speaking their own mind for the sake of speaking around here, instead of the vapid, superficial and clout-chasing ""people"" (read: [fascist] bots) of other websites.

Yeah. Yeah it's just you my dude. There's no way I've ever heard that sentiment before on websites or other posts.

I don't think it was social media. To be honest with you, this is the worst thing I have ever said. Seriously! I swear to god, it was once the "normies" got on the internet. I think "normies" are socialized to be cruel, and they took that cruelty to the internet. I loved it when it was for the freaks and the geeks. It was the best of the best!

It took my favorite activity (reading) and turned it into a social one. An educational one too! It was amazing. There's still bits out here. I mean look at us. But there's a lot of trash on these sites too. Just filter, enjoy your echo chamber, and be open to people entering it with opposite opinions. In fact, be open to opinions all over the place, even in person. Just saying, I use this as reprieve. I don't need to work myself up, I want to chill and cool down with it.

Everything's too like, corporate nowadays on mainstream internet. Like less about being social with others and more trying to sell a product or a brand or something. Those big tech names have optimized everything to extract as much profit as possible from you and your time with ever decreasing benefit to you.

Cuckerberg

I agree the internet feels a lot different than the eqrly 2000s, but breaking down what's different I can't pin anything concrete down.

There's pretty much no fundamental differences between how social media was and how it is now. People talk, share interests, get in arguments. What we feel is nostalgia for a wild west internet with less people and rules that will never exist again.

More people use the internet now so more people participate in the conversation. That's how it will be for the rest of human history probably.

I guarentee you're not the only one