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.
One of my favorite features of Lemmy is that there’s an actual functional downvote button. So many platforms nowadays are removing the downvote button or straight up making it useless. I remember when YouTube used to have a proper downvote button and it made it so easy to tell when a vid was not good or clickbait. Even on Reddit, the downvote button just changes the total score but it doesn’t actually show the number of downvotes. Being able to see the actual number of upvotes/downvotes is such a nice thing to see coming back.
One of the many benefits of not having functionality tied to profit margins and advertiser ingratiation
I still remember and miss when YouTube (and one or two music streaming services) had 5-star rating systems. Probably not as sensible for something like Reddit or Limmy, though.
Netflix switching from stars to thumbs up/down still infuriates me.
I liked the star system, too. As the site grew in popularity, people just ended up 1 or 5 starring stuff.
For the same reason - the “useful content” and “not useful content” buttons were dumbed down to “agree” and “disagree” buttons on reddit.
Agree that you can’t really ask people to use a star system for message boards. Much less microblogs.
Look, I’m all for reminiscing about “the good ole days” of YouTube, but let’s be honest - the 5-star-system was pretty useless, and was used in the same was as up/down thumbs.
You would either rate the video 5 stars or 1 star. Always.
The switch to thumbs up/down made it much more easy to judge a video. And with the green/red bar beneath, you badicslly had a more condensed star-rating.
YouTube (or rather Google) have made a lot of bad decisions regarding the platform over the years, but I sincerely think that switching to thumbs was a good change.
Negative people are always saying we’ll never see anything like the early internet again with how everything is owned by corporations, but this last week on Lemmy has come damn close for me! Time to go be nostalgic about asking A/S/L in AIM chatrooms while watching flash animations on https://joecartoon.com/ eh @[email protected]?
(I can’t believe that site is still running!)
Oh man, frog in a blender! You bring back memories.
Now to go see if elf bowling is still a thing…
I’m 51. I started with BBS’s, compuworld, Usenet and MUD telnet screens. I’ve seen access to the internet and pre internet go from 1,400 baud modems to 56,000 modems to the 5G internet access we have today.
To me, the fedeverse feels like a modern technology in development without corporations ruinous hands in it.
I really hope the corporate hold on social media is breaking, because they eventually ruined everything they touched in order to squeeze every last dollar out of it.
This is starting to feel like an iteration of BBS— edit: I say bbs, but really I mean Usenet. I guess this is like bbs with better threading and organization, and you login to your local mirror to see what’s new. I like it, just need to get my head around it.
Wow, 14k4 modems, those were great… after messing about with 300 and 1200 baud modems. (Never got the 300/73 one to work)
I live how the fediverse is more like the old bbs system, federative and not high-jacked by greedy corps. Maybe we’re returning to the core of public internet, before the masses swamped in.
BTW I’ll turn 51 in less then 2 months. ;) (gramps remembers… 🤣)
I forgot about my 1200 baud modem on my C64! Storage was a casset tape.
I’m younger than you, and I remember sweet chats with sysops on BBS:es and “rapid fire” message boards (one, then two, then four! replies daily), Fidonet “mailing” and then “mailing” through Usenet gateways via BBS, Gopher, LAN parties with token rings, the thrill of calling phreaked lines to call up a BBS on the other side of the Atlantic for local phone fees. Then with Internet, the Play by Email games with space strategy and fantasy. The plethora of different MUD:s with various themes and boundless optimism and plagiarism…
2400 or 14400 baud modem handshake signals still give me that thrilling feeling of freeedom and futurology. Just last year I had some of them added to my white noise list to sleep better as they also calm me down.
Your comment gave me fuzzy nice warm feelings.
I’d love to know more of this pre internet BBS. What does it stand for?
Guess what, I actually read the whole thing. (:
Guys we did it!
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I just used dogpile which was all the search engines in one.
Dogpile was my favorite.
Anyway that stuff doesn’t matter. What matters is it was pretty clear and mostly agreed that the internet works best when we use open protocols and not hide community generated content behind login screens and apps. We agreed to continue to participate in adding to the global knowledge as long as everyone played nice and allowed the content we put in for free, can be indexed, RSS’d, shared and scraped. This way anyone can find it and benefit from it.
This to me is the worst part of the enshittification of reddit. All that human interaction and knowledge base is “owned” and controlled by a profit driven entity. Reddit hasn’t done it yet, but I think the time is approaching when they gatekeep all that data behind a login, which will prevent it from showing up in google searches.
Bringing this full circle. Federated apps feel like the logical next steps. I think this path is the correct one.
Lemmy is only four years oldand will continue to get better. There will be other projects (kbin, plebbit to name a few) trying to accomplish the same thing as lemmy, exploration is good. It’s an exciting time for social media.
Plus, the bones are good - it doesn’t do everything, but what it does it does surprisingly efficiently and robustly. And there’s the rest of the fediverse for most of it - Lemmy doesn’t need to handle messages, there’s matrix for that (there’s even a matrix ID on the user definitions)
There’s definitely more to be done, like user migration and modtools, but a lot of the shortcomings are in the client. And now that it caught so much attention, you’re going to see a lot of apps and different web interfaces very soon
It’s kind of incredible what you can do on the client side too since there’s no company trying to keep you reliant on them. I’m building an app, and while I’m prioritizing getting it out ASAP, I’m looking through the data and imagining what I can build on top of it. Especially when the rest of the fediverse is taken into account.
It’s like a new Internet built on top of the one stolen from us
Do no evil google was pretty good.
Yahoo Directory was the bees knees.
I remember thinking AltaVista was the absolute best search engine for no particular reason, and being willing to die on that hill.
(I did not, in fact, die on that hill)
For one, “before Google was a thing” comment. It was popular very quickly and was not the first search engine
Depends on the country and the rate of internet penetration. I think I used Altavista a long time until I’ve heard of Google, at a time when Google was probably popular in the US. And before that, not knowing what a search engine is, I leaned about sites by typing links from newspapers.
Discord is the PERFECT example of a wrong turn down the wrong path. All I ask is stop making me use it to find information on your open source projects.
I now feel guilty of nuking my every comment and post on Reddit. They deserve it, but there are also users I helped and might of helped in the future with my answers. Not on open source projects of course, but general help with apps, services and configuration. Then again, Reddit wasn’t the ideal place to ask for help anyway.
Bringing this full circle. Federated apps feel like the logical next steps. I think this path is the correct one.
I feel you on this one too.
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The barrier to entry is what keeps these communities healthy.
I’ll further date myself… we all had our own Geocities webpage back in 2000/2001…
Hello my future girlfriend days lol. Man those were good times
an accurate summation of my thoughts on the matter as well - the active communities (not the ones that get created because they were big on reddit but have no content here) are the ones I like - there’s intriguing posts, insightful comments, actual conversation instead of toxic arguing.
lemmy is like a breath of fresh air.
I’m looking forwards to people getting into their grooves on lemmy. So far it seems like most people are just copying the good and bad parts from reddit without thinking. Downside is that its not exactly easy to start unique communities on demand.
yeah - it’s really easy to create a community but extremely difficult to foster it and make it grow - even if you’re just dumping loads of content into it on a daily basis, if there’s no interaction then it’s… not a waste of time, but perhaps next closest thing.
I havent managed to find something that I’m passionate about that doesnt already exist, so I just contribute to those communities that I can, as I find them.
Aye, that’s why I’m trying to focus on replying more than just creating my own. Id end up just adding to the spam. The “bug” of instant updating when trying to sort by new is a bit awkward lol
It’s just a matter of time till someone has their eureka moment.
set your default sort option in preferences to Subscribed / New - then you wont get bombed by new posts as the various instances feed/federate. it’ll still screw up occasionally but it occurs much less often (and then you just force refresh the page to set it back to “normal”).
I’m not saying Lemmy is going backwards, but I prefer this forum vibe I am experiencing here with people expressing their opinions and helping each other.
It does have a little early yahoo groups&chat vibe here, doesn’t it? Let’s just pay attention we keep the toxic and predatory stuff away that killed that.
I really missed the early internet charoom vibes. Every day you discovered something new, every person with a random handle felt like a human connection.
I still remember the day when I first talked live to someone who lived thousands of km away from me. Was a magical moment.
Yes, this! I made some of my best friends on Yahoogroups as a teenager. I felt SO alone in the world before I found out that my fandom has a whole ass community online, and it was truly magical to feel seen for the first time.
It regrettably did get toxic. And I really hope we can avoid that here, but it won’t be without intentional effort.
I have to say it does feel pretty cool and like the good old days. No big corporations at the moment, just people figuring stuff out and doing their own thing. I’m liking this a lot
On Reddit I always felt like a raindrop in an ocean. I’m just one of way too many, and very little of what I wrote was ever seen or engaged with. That was discoursing at times, especially when I put plenty of thought or research into my reply, only for it to have no engagement while typical low-effort replies like “this!” Or “I’m a simple person I see x I updoot” always rise to the top. It was starting to feel like all the other social media I’ve quit over the years, and I was originally there because it felt like a forum, not social media. I’m on kbin now and I’m getting the feeling I got from posting on forums like Playstation Underground when I was younger. I even recognize user avatars across different threads and magazines/communities, which definitely reminds me of forums of old. Who knows what it will become but the federated nature of it means it can feel as big or small as I want it to, which is what is keeping me invested.
This is exactly how I felt on reddit! With Kbin I feel more at “home”, with reddit I felt distant, the same with most other social media platforms. I feel like me and others feel less stressed when contributing to a discussion here compared to how I felt on reddit.
It feels calmer here now that I think about it. I think being part of the huge swarm and trying to stand out and made things feel pretty hectic at times.
Agreed. kbin has been thoroughly enjoyable so far, to the point that I kinda hope it remains a small, niche thing. I loved forums and smaller communities when I was younger in the early-mid 2000’s, and this really is the first time I’ve been able to capture that feeling again since. I’m glad reddit is run by an egomaniacal dickhead, because without him, I’d never have gone looking for something better. It feels like people are slowly, but surely becoming tired of the ‘corporate centralized internet’, and are looking to branch out to smaller, but more meaningful free communities.
I’m actually excited for the first time in almost 10 years.
I’ve been thinking of going complete 2003 and going back to flip phones. I’m just tired of the greed over wanting me to see ads. I fucking can’t stand ads and go out of my way to avoid them. Reddit was trying to force me to use their app so they can collect data to show me ads.
imo, simplifying your digital life is completely worth it. I personally have no social media outside of this site, have ads blocked on all my devices, use Brave as my browser (it has its issues, but for the most part, it does what I need it to), use GrapheneOS instead of Android, use ProtonMail instead of Gmail, and access YouTube through a NewPipe fork that integrates SponsorBlock, use Signal as my messenger (or SMS otherwise.) This generally has kept me from doomscrolling and wasting my mental energy throughout the day, and now that I no longer have a reddit account, I’m even better off than I was before.
At some point I realized that life with so many modern conveniences and centralized power just made me unhappy. I absolutely believe there’s merit to the idea that not everything needs to be made as easy and accessible as possible. Humans need time away from the internet, and they need some kind of challenge, even if it’s as simple as needing to use SMS instead of Facebook Messenger, or have an algorithm shove what it THINKS you want to see in your face 24/7.
Anyway, I’m rambling. Basically, I agree with you haha
I just did the same thing with youtube, switched to piped and now I purely engage through the subscription feed. Fuck the algorithms, I decide what I want to watch!
The internet was taken over by wall street. The fediverse is a revolt against that.
discovering flashy websites
To anyone interested in this, there’s a thing called neocities.org
Remember when Facebook released a “friends and family update” that they said would take the site back closer to connecting you with real people? That was the moment they finally died. The fact that they had drifted from that showed they were actually pursuing something else the whole time. And the update barely made a difference, but they patted themselves on the back anyway and bragged that it even cost them some revenue but they felt it was right for users 😖
It is my hope that we move past the era of Reddit’s postmodern cynicism of powermods and personalized ad algorithms and tired attempt to try to sell things into an era of New Sincerity.
I hope we are witnessing the birth of the real Web 3.0 here. Blockchain being Web 3.0 was always a lie, because internet contents are ultimately interaction between of people, and not things or money.
I keep seeing you everywhere, Margot Robbie. I had no idea you were so insightful or knowledgeable about tech.
In Hollywood, hot women like me just tie our hair back and put on glasses and we become professional hackers.
Haven’t you watched any CW show before?
Also, “Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.
This is beautiful and true.
