Iām 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 groundsā¦ 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 itās 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 Iāve 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 arenāt 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 isnāt 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.
It canāt last. Right now, lemmy/ActivityPub is in the āearly adopterā stage of the tech hype cycle. The only people here now are the people who are willing to try out something new. If there are enough āearly adoptersā, Lemmy will become interesting, and then the normal people will follow. This would lead to an āeternal Septemberā effect of declining quality. Then theyāre followed by the spammers and people looking to make a profit.
If basically feels like reinventing Usenet, with maybe some extra modern features.
Thereās one big weakness. There appears to be some sort of shared blocklist. If people wind up being placed on the list for petty reasons rather than genuine misbehavior, that could become a problem. I.e., the people maintaining the blocklist decide they disagree with X politically, and then X winds up on the blocklist even though they really werenāt abusive. Then people running nodes are going to have to start manually reviewing the blocklist and making exceptions, which most people wonāt bother doing.
It canāt last. Right now, lemmy/ActivityPub is in the āearly adopterā stage of the tech hype cycle.
Folks have been saying this about Mastodon for years and itās only grown. Facebookās now looking at investing in ActivityPub. Itās a W3C standard for federation on the internet and the amount of apps supporting it is only growing.
I think probably the most bleak thing that could happen is that maybe Lemmy has a smaller user base and only a small amount of people convert over from Reddit. But even then Iām kinda happy with that. I like what Iām doing on here and I like the community so far. And I could deal with a smaller set of communities that are ad-free, have a pretty great experience, etc. etc.
This would lead to an āeternal Septemberā effect of declining quality.
This has been the way of Internet communities since the Internet started, really. So I donāt think anyone (OP included) really believes this whole wild-frontier, brave-new-world kind of deal will last long. But having gone from MySpace to Facebook to Reddit to here, having a new platform at least gives me hope that there will always be a new one to jump to when the current one really turns to crap.
