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.
I grew up late to the early internet days as I am just about as old as google itself. However, even in my time I remember light saber mouse cursors, neo colored backgrounds, the stupid but adorable fairy animations all over myspace, and websites auto playing Queen songs. There was character that we put it as a community.
While I may not be the biggest fan of the flat design of the lemmy website and how clinical it all seems, the FOSS nature leads to so much customization with apps and so forth while the content y’all produce is absolutely magical. If I see an ad I know it’s cause one of you have something unique to actually show off and it’s not just bots pushing me to open my wallet. Thank you, you lovely bunch of adorable dufuses.
discovering flashy websites
To anyone interested in this, there’s a thing called neocities.org
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
It can’t last. Right now, lemmy/ActivityPub is in the “early adopter” 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 “early adopters”, Lemmy will become interesting, and then the normal people will follow. This would lead to an “eternal September” effect of declining quality. Then they’re followed by the spammers and people looking to make a profit.
If basically feels like reinventing Usenet, with maybe some extra modern features.
There’s 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 weren’t abusive. Then people running nodes are going to have to start manually reviewing the blocklist and making exceptions, which most people won’t bother doing.
It can’t last. Right now, lemmy/ActivityPub is in the “early adopter” stage of the tech hype cycle.
Folks have been saying this about Mastodon for years and it’s only grown. Facebook’s now looking at investing in ActivityPub. It’s 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 I’m kinda happy with that. I like what I’m 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 “eternal September” effect of declining quality.
This has been the way of Internet communities since the Internet started, really. So I don’t 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.
Something isn’t adding up here. 32? Joined Facebook in 2005? Facebook, until 2006, required a valid college (in the American sense) email address. Being 32 would put your high school graduation in the neighborhood of 2009. So did you go to college ~4 years early, sneak on, or do I have something wrong in my timeline?
I was thinking the same, I remember being peeved I couldn’t get on Facebook in 2005, because I was only in community college, and therefore not fancy enough to join.😆
Regardless, it’s a nice sentiment. Every time I sign on I find myself smiling with how neat this community is.
