Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The main difference to today was twofold:

For one there were no algorithms fighting to keep you online at any cost – at some point you were done with the internet for the day, as mind blowing as this may sound.

But more importantly: The old internet was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages gathering around shared beliefs and interests.

These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains. These communities worked because they mirrored real life much more than social media:

Each village had its own culture and set of rules. Maybe one community was into rough humour and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned easily.

If you didn’t play by the village rules,  you would be banned – or you could just go and move to another village that suited you better.

So instead of all of us gathering in one place, overwhelming our brains at a townsquare that in the end just leads to us going insane, one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple:

go back to smaller online communities.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Yeah but there's literally nothing the Fediverse does better than a PHBB forum.

I actually hate the interconnected yet fragmented environment here - there's absurd amounts of redundancies in communities, resulting in dead spaces; you don't need 20 different federated servers all with their variations of the same communities, for example sports teams - you have fanaticus.social which is literally specifically for sports, but then every single local instance like midwest.social or lemmy.ca will have duplicate or even triplicate communities. This does nothing but make the whole platform seem big and empty and bereft of users or interactions.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think once a community gets popular, the duplicates die away or act as backups when an instance goes down. That's generally a good thing because instances have disappeared overnight, and Lemmy is still in development

We had a movies&tv instance that was popular, and then it disappeared overnight so the smaller local instances took over till we got a new popular one

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

[email protected] for people wondering

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

"literally nothing"

As if PHPBB forums didn't have duplicated subforums

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

If they were properly curated, they didn't. It's not like an admin from any other instance can delete duplicate communities from other instances.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Why would the admin of one PHPBB forum "curate" subforums on another PHPBB forum? If you had 10 different PHPBB forums about politics in separate countries, they would all have a "world" subforum (or something similarly named) in each. The only thing happening with the fediverse is that you're actively seeing what would happen if PHPBB forums were connected.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Admins can block them though. Infinite communties in infinite combinations makes a lot more sense when you think about content moderation. Like- imagine if the only politics community Reddit allowed was run by the r/conspircacy mods.

The fediverse is basically like PhPBB forums with a single login.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

I remember there being at least 3 separate popular forums just for the Dodge neon.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

It's pretty bad for small communities. A new factorio update drops and we have a thread on beehaw, lemmy and kbin gaming communities. Meanwhile the actual factorio community (on either of these servers) also gets a thread but it's mostly empty.

For some communities this makes sense but I feel like it just kills any smaller ones, they just never get a chance to take off properly.

It doesn't help that the fediverse search is just atrocious.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah. In my opinion lemmy is just one layer to deep for the federated concept. Everybody should host their own subreddit and not their own reddit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

That's partilly more on the people creating duplicates without looking if the community doesn't exist already.

Granted, the lemmy explorer tool might not be around for too long for people to be easily able to - since someone on you instance needs to known a community exists on other instance and access it for everyone to see it. And some people might just not be aware of it as well.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That’s partilly more on the people creating duplicates without looking if the community doesn’t exist already

Which is not bad; actually and to the contrary, it can be a part of each instance's cultural identity and it's a practical way of ensuring the diversity and viability of smaller instances.

Discussing c/soccer in an Argentinian lemmy can be very different than discussing it in hexbear, for example. Not to mention it's likely most of everyone would't even be able to participate in hexbear's. Furthermore, general subjects becoming tied to the largest instances, which statistically have more surface to cover the creation of communities for any subject ever, returns us to the same problem of conversation and community becoming centralized into a "Reddit" instance.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

A good perspective I didn't have.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Are you talking about https://lemmyverse.net/ ? Why should it disappear?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What I meant is I have no idea how long it exists, so people might not have the luxury of using it to check for existing communities.

Didn't mean to start a panic with bad wording :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I see. Hopefully it will stay around, or an equivalent will emerge :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I do too! Its incredibly handy

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I think we'll collectively figure it out with time and have more specific, yet popular instances, rather than instances trying to be the all-places with communities. Like an instance for memes where communities act as sub-categories or something.

But I maybe wrong, I'm not on oracle or something.