One of my favorite features of Lemmy is that there's an actual functional downvote button. So many platforms nowadays are removing the downvote button or straight up making it useless. I remember when YouTube used to have a proper downvote button and it made it so easy to tell when a vid was not good or clickbait. Even on Reddit, the downvote button just changes the total score but it doesn't actually show the number of downvotes. Being able to see the actual number of upvotes/downvotes is such a nice thing to see coming back.

Negative people are always saying we'll never see anything like the early internet again with how everything is owned by corporations, but this last week on Lemmy has come damn close for me! Time to go be nostalgic about asking A/S/L in AIM chatrooms while watching flash animations on https://joecartoon.com/ eh @[email protected]?

(I can't believe that site is still running!)

I'm 51. I started with BBS's, compuworld, Usenet and MUD telnet screens. I've seen access to the internet and pre internet go from 1,400 baud modems to 56,000 modems to the 5G internet access we have today.

To me, the fedeverse feels like a modern technology in development without corporations ruinous hands in it.

I really hope the corporate hold on social media is breaking, because they eventually ruined everything they touched in order to squeeze every last dollar out of it.

I'm not saying Lemmy is going backwards, but I prefer this forum vibe I am experiencing here with people expressing their opinions and helping each other.

an accurate summation of my thoughts on the matter as well - the active communities (not the ones that get created because they were big on reddit but have no content here) are the ones I like - there's intriguing posts, insightful comments, actual conversation instead of toxic arguing.

lemmy is like a breath of fresh air.

Guess what, I actually read the whole thing. (:

That’s a pretty good timeline. However, as someone born in the very early 80s, I have a couple thoughts.

For one, “before Google was a thing” comment. It was popular very quickly and was not the first search engine. So I’m not sure what kind of context a 8 year old ( based on your age ) would have on the internet before Google. I remember before Google. I remember AOL v1.x , prodigy, the first web browser and using local dial up BBS’ hosted by the local news papers. Certainly doesn’t go back as far as some people, but I had a very clear before Google understanding.

Another would be Facebook. It used to require a college email. It was incredible. A space only for college kids. I’d argue Facebook died for a lot of us by 2005-6. Whenever open registration occurred. I liked MySpace because it was like a interactive profile page and nothing more. There wasn’t a whole lot of pressure. It was a way to let someone find you. Kind of like handing out a digital business card.

Anyway that stuff doesn’t matter. What matters is it was pretty clear and mostly agreed that the internet works best when we use open protocols and not hide community generated content behind login screens and apps. We agreed to continue to participate in adding to the global knowledge as long as everyone played nice and allowed the content we put in for free, can be indexed, RSS’d, shared and scraped. This way anyone can find it and benefit from it.

I have news for you all. It’s probably going to all get a lot worse far before it ever gets better. Discord’s rise in popularity is one. FOR ALL THAT IS HOLY! KIDS! PLEASE STOP USING DISCORD AS A PLACE FOR DOCUMENTATION AND SUPPORT ON PROJECTS. This isn’t some kind of problem that needed a discord as the solution. I don’t care if you want to use it for chatting and discussions and gaming ( matrix is a thing btw), but leave the documentation and technical stuff in a git repo where it belongs.

Bringing this full circle. Federated apps feel like the correct next steps. I think this path is the correct one.

I’ll further date myself… we all had our own Geocities webpage back in 2000/2001…

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 does have a little early yahoo groups&chat vibe here, doesn't it? Let's just pay attention we keep the toxic and predatory stuff away that killed that.

Good conversations on kbin, Lemmy, Squabbles, et al. I think there's a new feeling of solidarity and ownership with these new (to some of us) forums. I'm here for it.

It is my hope that we move past the era of Reddit's postmodern cynicism of powermods and personalized ad algorithms and tired attempt to try to sell things into an era of New Sincerity.

I hope we are witnessing the birth of the real Web 3.0 here. Blockchain being Web 3.0 was always a lie, because internet contents are ultimately interaction between of people, and not things or money.

This is the better internet.

Remember, what people like of the internet is engaging with other people. Content is secondary, outrage is clickbait to monetize ads. What we like aboud platforms is not the tech, but other humans.

Remember when Facebook released a “friends and family update” that they said would take the site back closer to connecting you with real people? That was the moment they finally died. The fact that they had drifted from that showed they were actually pursuing something else the whole time. And the update barely made a difference, but they patted themselves on the back anyway and bragged that it even cost them some revenue but they felt it was right for users 😖

On Reddit I always felt like a raindrop in an ocean. I'm just one of way too many, and very little of what I wrote was ever seen or engaged with. That was discouraging at times, especially when I put plenty of thought or research into my reply, only for it to have no engagement while typical low-effort replies like "this!" Or "I'm a simple person I see x I updoot" always rise to the top. It was starting to feel like all the other social media I've quit over the years, and I was originally there because it felt like a forum, not social media. I'm on kbin now and I'm getting the feeling I got from posting on forums like Playstation Underground when I was younger. I even recognize user avatars across different threads and magazines/communities, which definitely reminds me of forums of old. Who knows what it will become but the federated nature of it means it can feel as big or small as I want it to, which is what is keeping me invested.

The internet was taken over by wall street. The fediverse is a revolt against that.

I'm also noticing a satisfying lack of the /s tag.

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?

Well then, welcome to the Fediverse I guess :P

Get comfy, as Kbin and Lemmy aren't the only services part of the Fediverse. There's also Microblogging services like Mastodon, YouTube-like Video sharing through Peertube and even self-hosted streaming with OwnCast.

There's statistics on https://fedidb.org, on which there's also a list of instances/servers on all kinds of topics using all kinds of software.

We ain't corporate, we're a community.

Funny how it feels like the old forums isn't it?

I'm glad we found this place.

You moved me.

Man this takes me back... I also remember the early days of the internet, browsing it on my dad's computer. I miss these dumb times.

Internet forums that were based on phpBB and other popular scripts were one of the best parts of the internet that Reddit and Facebook shamelessly killed with the applause of the netizens. Centralization of those forums was a huge regression and it felt like we went to a point that was worse than Web 1.0. I feel like Lemmy is a return of that forum culture that made the internet great.

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.

You nailed just about everything that I've been enjoying about Lemmy, too!

To me, it's definitely reminiscent of reddit circa 2011-2012. There aren't any bots yet, so discussions feel more grounded; and it has a similar air of wonder to it, like people are still excited for both what the community is and what it can be.

...Except for the sorting. Sorting by Subscribed or Local feel reddit-ish, with the former being a self-curated feed and the latter being a broader discovery feed of whatever going on in your chosen instance. Sorting by All, though, feels a bit like stepping back to my old high-school 4chan days, but with less sharpies in buttholes.

Definitely. This place is a (much needed) step back to what the internet used to be. Somewhere between 15-20 years ago and now, the online growth experienced obviously went in a wrong direction. I'm glad these huge social media conglomerations were a testing ground for us to discover how the web should not work, and Lemmy is a step in the right direction.

It’s such a nice breath of fresh air that I really didn’t know I needed. But now, looking back, it’s so obvious things weren’t the way they should be. And here, in the fediverse, things feel like they are exactly how they should be! It’s so nice!