this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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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.