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.
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.
I did actually check if Usenet activity was back up, at least on the groups I used to be active on back in the day... unfortunately, nope.
I don't know how to use usenet except for piracy ๐ and even then it was confusing as hell. But it does sound cool to use bulletin-board software from before there was bulletin-board software.
To some degree, isn't everything just reinventing something with some extra features? Discord is just IRC
Typically, the clients for discussions were fairly different from the binaries-only clients used today. Microplanet Gravity and 40tude Dialog were the big ones back then. Nowadays, only a few are maintained, but if you're interested, I recommend Pan (or slrn if you're comfortable with text mode). Finding active discussion newsgroups is a challenge on the modern Usenet though, it feels like trying to find a few survivors around the ruins of abandoned groups. A huge advantage of Usenet back in the day was when using dial-up internet, which used up your home phone line at the time. There were some parts of the world where you paid a flat monthly rate, but in mine and most others you paid by the minute. Using Usenet clients, as well as POP3 clients for email, you'd just connect to the internet, download everything and disconnect, then read everything, write your answers, reconnect to the internet and send/receive. Very efficient, and one of the reasons why despite some issues it had it held up until the 1-2-3 punch of the mass adoption of high-speed internet, social networks, and modern form of smartphones. Email is probably the only surviving old protocol that is despite webification still used by a large amount of people directly using separate clients. In a way, Usenet and IRC were also just that, protocols, with free and open source implementations. Back then most servers were maintained by ISPs and educational institutions, and sort of like Lemmy, your local Usenet server would also sync up with big groups out there. Discord is, again, a singular service - at risk of enshittification and failure, like Reddit, and any tech company. To me, federated and decentralized stuff like Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix etc. does seem to have a lot of a spirit and resiliency of old-school ideas we had with Usenet and IRC back in the day. The biggest hurdle back then (and now, for fediverse) is getting a critical mass of regular people on here, not just free software enthusiasts or early adopters. It's something that major social networks are very, very good at.