this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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I don't think it's dying. I hope it's a paradigm shift like when it changed from wild west lawless chaos to three or four huge companies running all of it. Maybe we end up with everything replaced by different distributed services. It's going to incredibly annoying when half the search results are dead links or links to reddit but that annoyance can drive innovation.
I’m 100% down to go back to Wild West.
The feeling and freedom of playing runescape on the early 2000s unfiltered internet was something I’ve missed. Maybe it’s coming back.
100% agree. I think we were better off with the Wild West. Users were actually in charge, server admins were small operators who didn't have to answer to venture capitalists who wanted to 10x their investment, not everything was data scraped and logged to build advertising profiles on the entire population. Each community set its own rules, you didn't have one guy in California deciding what the AUP would be for millions and then changing it on a whim because some advertiser got pissed off.
While the big companies have created some very cool stuff, and using it is very approachable without any technical knowledge, I would trade it all in to go back to the situation where not everything is hosted on some megaplatform. I think it's better for the internet that way.
I like to think that sort of movement is making a resurgence, I'm seeing more people involved in self-hosting stuff, and with recent changes at Reddit and Twitter there's a lot more interest in decentralized communication platforms.
I also think the platform is the key. I don't think any one person or group should be in charge of the public square. Not Spez not Elon and certainly not Tencent or anyone connected with an authoritarian government.
Yeah those were good times posting trolls on a site made by some dude who was a carpenter running the site in his spare time. Site had only one rule: don't be an asshole, which would only get enforced when that one dude got home from work.
Though I'm not sure that's all that feasible now, too many idiots on the internet Poe's law and all that. We can't be all that wild anymore because there's idiots that take this shit too seriously now.
But I think the Fediverse is an interesting middle ground. I can foresee racist whack jobs setting up some instances resulting in a weird broken web of sites that are sometimes federated, sometimes not. Maybe we can organize troll raids on the bad guy sites and shit like that.
It could be wild times, but I think it'll be a different kind of wild than before.
the answer to that is somewhat larger moderation teams, like 6-8 people in their spare time, ideally not in the same timezone. hundreds of thousands, if not millions of said teams have self-organized in the past couple of years with all the corpo platforms going full "user-generated content" on moderation as well, in an effort to scale their empires, and now they're questioning just how necessary those corpos are.
It's definitely going to be different. Probably a mix between the old and the new. But I think the real benefit is it offers space for everybody. The people who want to be wild can do so, and those who don't need to have nothing to do with them.
Yet TikTok is still vastly more popular then lemmy or reddit.
So what?
There's a place for that. Back in the old IRC days there was a place for AOL. Let TikTok and Reddit keep the idiots.
I mean, I went from Facebook to Reddit to Lemmy.
Seems like a good trajectory.
Next step is heading back to old "General Talk" sections of random message boards like it's 2003. Is the Massassi Temple Forum (Jedi Knight game) still around?
Forums were some of the best way to get info before everything had its own subreddit and its own discord. It's cool to be able to chat directly with creators and that ilk, but I do miss the community on like the Jedi knight forums, SWG forums, gameFAQs boards, and even those sketchy Zelda timeline sites.
It's not.
The problem is, you won't get the sort of compatibility you enjoy now any more. So many different applications, phone keyboards etc support gfycat and that's where all the content is.
They won't support dozens of disparate led popular services spread across the internet.
Those services are also likely to be less reliable, less well moderated for offensive/illegal content and such, and more likely to randomly disappear.
Like why Reddit was such a success, I want stability. I want one, reliable, centralised place I can go for everything.
Another concern I have, considering Lemmy specifically, is hacking of their infrastructure. Is my Lemmy account data as secure as my Reddit account? No. The software isn't as secure, and the security teams are non existent, it's just a guy (a wonderful guy!) hosting this as a hobby.
And even if one server does get a proper tech security team, that's just one server.
There's also the question of WHO is hosting a Lemmy instance being used, are they trustworthy? Are they being independently audited? Have they been found in compliance with GDPR? Are they secretly selling our data? Could be, who knows.
For all the awful things that come with a big company like Reddit, there's more scrutiny, accountability, etc.
I don't mean to diss Lemmy, I'm really really hopeful for it. I just have a lot of early concerns, things they'll have to solve before I can really see it being the trustworthy, solid cornerstone of the internet I'd like it to be.
I don't think it's wrong to keep questions like these in mind, it's great for information security and your privacy!
I'm with ya - no hate and no ill will to the hosts of any of these instances, but a cautious or informed user is a safe user. And safe users tend to mean user longevity on a platform! So it's kind of cyclical, the "safety> accountability> user" relationship.
Given that Reddit is going to sell your data to anyone willing to pay, is reddit really all that secure?
Russia, China, the NSA, or whoever else you're worried about can just set up some fake business claiming to be a marketing company and simply buy access to all of your data on reddit's servers.
Nothing you post on the internet is ever really private.
Sorry for the extra posts! Kept getting a post error on mobile.
Search engines will just have to get better at scrubbing their databases. Most of this stuff is ephemeral so it's usually a deep search that leads to these old threads...and future dead links. Distributed services isn't bad, it's just different. Pre-web it was archie, gopher, veronica, usenet, etc. Now all those things - or their equivalent data - run on top of the web. It's just an evolution.
I say we all go back to browsing the web via Lynx and chatting it up on IRC. Who's with me?
Reject modernity, return to bbs
With FIDOnet, you can send a message and get a reply in mere days! The future really is amazing!
I miss IRC…
Me too. I think it's not missing the platform or the protocol, it's the attitude that went with it. It was a time of experimentation, people would spin up websites and services and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't but it was ours. People would forward a port to a spare laptop and make a shitty server for IRC or shoutcast or video game or something like that and it all belong to us, there were no huge platforms in charge. Each community could set their own rules and not have to worry about what an advertiser was okay with. And there weren't big platforms scraping every last keystroke further monetize us.
It was a lot less accessible for people not willing to learn technical skill, but I think in many ways we were better off. There was a lot more freedom and more independence.
The tech knowledge was its own gatekeeping and filter. I also miss slapping people with a wet trout... Actually, it's mostly the trout nostalgia for me...
LazaroFilm slaps SirEDCaLot around a bit with a large troutI love it! I remember that...
The tech stuff was a bit of a filter, true. There will always be a place for services like AOL was back then- the super easy to use 'dumbed down' platform for those who don't want to learn. I think the result of 'Rexxit' may be that- the smart folks come to Lemmy and the dumb ones stay put. Not sure if that's good or bad.
By dumb ones I don't mean people who lack technical knowledge, I mean people who need the answer spoon fed to them. Because I think we should be realistic. Compare Matrix to WhatsApp, compare Lemmy to Reddit, the biggest 'filter' is having to choose a home server when signing up and then not having all the content sprayed at you automatically. If that is what we call 'difficult' then I argue our standards as a society are too low.
And I think in the old internet culture there was plenty of space for different levels of skill. The people with technical skill were the ones setting up little servers on their cable modems with spare laptops, The people without technical skill were the ones just using them and learning. Nothing wrong with that I don't think. Big platforms make both groups equal, anybody can spin up a discord server or start a subreddit, but at the expense of everybody's control. If the experienced user and the inexperienced user both want things running differently, they don't get that choice because it's not under their control.
A/S/L?
There's only one correct answer: 18/f/Cali
Three or four huge companies sounds terrible