Get away from commercial social media. Chat services were always more helpful, and you don’t have to deal with algorithms dragging you down. I’m on Matrix, IRC, and Discord, and in only communities that are relevant to my interests, academic, or autism centric. I browse Lemmy occasionally, but even it has the same pitfalls.

I still remember every weekend during my youth when I would ask my dad to allow me to connect the LAN cable to my room’s computer just to connect to the internet. I remember being stuck in the computer room at school when I had no friends in real life, even when there’s no internet, in hopes to go online one day, just anything to keep me busy. But now the internet feels toxic, a hyperreality, a magnification of society’s inherent traits, especially the non-autistics, and now even online feels about as bad as offline, even worse with its intense criticism of anything neurodivergent.

Tldr: neurotypicals ruin everything good.

Man this resonated so hard. I think the author and I are approximately the same age so the narrative progression of their experience of the internet reflects mine so hard. I’d like to hope that the fediverse is in some way an attempt to reach back toward that, but the issue I see is that most of the applications that have been developed are aping the format of for-profit, ad driven, infiniscroll based engagement machines. The islands of self-contained niche interest are now few and far between and near impossible to discover because search is shit.

That said, I think some form of federated curated search is an interesting concept that may actually be scalable enough to be useful yet restricted enough to not be considered commercially viable and this attractive to SEO spam.

Anyway, this is my first comment on Lemmy, thanks for sharing this :)