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.
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.
Liberals really can't write a single post without sliding in a "China Bad", can they?
Average lemmygrad L take
Tankies fuck off
Hold up... Are you arguing that the idea China has an authoritarian government that we shouldn't put in charge of the internet is just a liberal political position? And not an acknowledgement of the reality of China's government?
You have added nothing to the conversation other than defending authoritarianism. Hope you're proud
So you admit conservatives love authoritarian regimes?
Not many conservatives defend China, pretty sure they're a tankie.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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