Ask Lemmy

Does anybody not think that?

It's clear, but I have the impression they were abandoned in favor of social networks...

Not really, no. Social Medias can and will exist at any scale, some more or less harmful than others. For example, even Lemmy is filled with people spreading propaganda for foreign dictatorships.

We should take the good with the bad and takes steps to protect our own rights and privacy while helping others do the same. Just as people did during the dawn of the internet, when scams we easily recognize today were unknown dangers before.

Algorithm curated content driven by engagement doesn't deserve to be called social media any more. The Feed, seems apropriate, malnourishing as it is.

Social media is fine if handled well. Like there were no problems with myspace or early facebook. The problem with social media is when it becomes more based on algorithm than communication. Mass communication isn't the problem, it's the algorithm

You're probably not the only one.

However, the interest (on Lemmy-aligned circles at least) in self-hosting, reducing depedence on large tech companies, community building on smaller scale online and offline, has me excited again that the smaller counterculture can co-exist with the mainstream profit-motivated social media culture.

The problem with centralized social media is it replaced all aspects of free speach and public opinion with algorithms that keep you hooked while all your personal information is being sold and given away. It doesn't have to be that way. Learn about free software, what it means, it's history, and it's impact on the world today. Learn about the fediverse. Most importantly, don't expect things to change if you don't. https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

It's not 2017-18 social media, friend. It's just late state capitalism.

And the lion's share of it can be traced to increasing real estate and rent prices.

Most people aren't made for the internet.

Most people can't handle the type of information. Most people fall for rage-bait, hate-inducing, right-wing propaganda.

We need to find a way to make the internet a thing where there's only people on it who actually want to use the internet in a healthy way.

One way to do this is to say no to commercialized parts of the internet. Say no to all commercial platforms selling ads or selling your data. These are full of rage-bait and only attract the worst in humans.

In its Facebook and onward phase, yes I agree. Prior to that we had this wonderful site called Livejournal where you could privately blog to a select group of friends, and it was the absolute best way to brain dump, have people give you real advice, and make the best online friends. Yes it had much controversy when it was bought by a Russian company, I can point you to a podcast if you want more detail on that, and certainly there was drama sometimes, but I would give a lot to just talk to my friends as a group that way again and really know each other deeply that way again, and other than the odd very ignorable ad, you weren't forced to be part of an algorithm or AI horseshit or fake news or verified accounts or any of that garbage. You could buy a permanent account for 100 dollars for the added features, but that was basically started to keep the site running after it took off. It really was beautiful and helpful and loving and felt organic and true for that time.

Have you ever noticed how hard it is for novels or TV or any other fictional platform to include anything about smartphones or using social media? When it is mentioned it feels very awkward and forced into the narrative.

I'm not old enough to have known the old internet, but the photo- and video-based social media never felt attractive to me. The only social media that I used was Reddit, but now I'm here. I appreciate the genuine people speaking their own mind for the sake of speaking around here, instead of the vapid, superficial and clout-chasing ""people"" (read: [fascist] bots) of other websites.

Nah. Just corpos.

The spirit of the internet was dead long before that.

It definitely desecrated the corpse, though.

It's all about the money honey....

The old internet was just an intermediate stage between the standardised internet, and before the internet when you had to find a clear channel through the ionosphere. Congratulations, however old you are, you've lived long enough to be bitter that the world has changed.

Now if we're talking about the specific way it's developed with a new generation of robber barons controlling everything, obviously few here will disagree.

I think you're confusing social media and late stage capitalism. Social media hasn't done anything to anyone, capitalism has used social media to further its own ends.

Social media brought all the normies into the internet. Normies ruin everything.

Yes. I'm a big fan of lemmy. I hope peertube gets going I feel it will be like the original YouTube

Throughout history, every village had one idiot, two max. And maybe one psycho.

Today thanks to the power of the internet these idiots and those psychos can unite and create big communities and represent a strong unified force in the world.

I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.

Welcome :)

It’s a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I’ve noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.

This a very interesting metaphor, real spot on.

But I would say a lot of that rural Internet has not disappeared, not yet. It's still there, very much alive. People are simply not visiting it anymore. They don't dare go outside the pretty walled-gardens they're used to.

But those people wanting to stay parked in their corporate-owned gardens, or silos, doesn't make that small and more humane web go away. And would they chose to, they could still come visit it freely, they could still easily interact with their creators. They could even create and tend to their very own part of it, making that small Web a richer place.

They just don't do it. Most of the time because they can't be bothered with doing the actual work, or because they're afraid to try and to fail. They want to be fed easy to eat content, not learn to cook it themselves.

They want the a Web that is like those shitty fast-food serving standardized and over-processed industrial food. Something ready to eat that is barely food at all but that will stuff their belly and, more importantly, that will never surprise them. Alas, this food is as much a poison for their head as it is for their body. They will realize that too late. It probably already is.

Too bad, because the alternative is still a thing, not that far away.

The small web is still a thing. Many blogs still exist that only share content their author sincerely care about or is interested in, that are ads and tracking free, that respect their readers... But the majority of people have quit visiting them, they simply don't go outside of, say, YT, X, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok or whatever where they can all stay together parked like the cattle they have not yet realized they have become.

Back to your original metaphor. Digital rurality is still there and many could easily own a small part of it and make it exwactly like they want it to be, and be happy with it. But they prefer staying in the large over-crowed cities, in small overpriced apartments like most their friends are doing.

Lemmy is a great alternative to reddit but it could relatively easily become another silos—just plural and not corporate-owned but silos nonetheless. It's up to us to keep it open to the alternatives. I mean, sometimes I feel sad to see little posts & comments inviting people to go read/watch something they liked that is not already hosted on some corporate-owned platform. Heck, sharing personal content feels so much like a lost cause to me that I seldom share a link to my own blog posts: why bother? I also publish a lot less often than I used to, here again: why bother?

Pretty much but don't let that stop you from posting in other place. I try to make habit of posting in game forums of games I'm playing in. Sometime they have decent off-topic section where you can talk about other stuff. Only normies stick to social medias, us nerds stick to real internet.

It's not destroyed, it's just no longer dominant.

Social media is just a symptom of the larger problem which is the corporations prefering to build walled gardens so they can control users rather than the open protocols that defined the early internet. Back in the day, I used to call it "everything becoming facebook".

Social media is fundamentally a moat - a wall built around a set of consumers to keep them away from competitors. Investors love moats. If you whisper as quietly as you possibly can to yourself "I found a company with a wide moat that no one is talking about yet" JP Morgan himself will literally burst through your wall like the Kool Aid Man. They love it because it avoids competition, and as much as competition is the whole point of capitalism, it's the last thing an actual capitalist wants to deal with.

A big part of what made the early internet super valuable was the opposite of moats: open protocols. For example how GMail can send email to Yahoo or any other email provider. If Google had their way, that's not how email would work at all - you'd need a google account to both send and receive emails. That's why these companies have been trying to kill email for ages, trying to get people to use their own proprietary messaging systems instead, where you can only send to others with an account. Then they could capture you and keep you all to themselves.

Which brings us to the fediverse. The fediverse is an attempt to return to open protocols rather than creating a moat around a group of users. In many ways it's like email - your email provider might cut off a server if it's just sending spam all day, and this is basically defederation. But otherwise nothing stops you from communicating with anyone, and that's how it should be.