The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.
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.
I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.
It has destroyed society.
I miss the days of everyone trying to have their own websites. It provided much more variety and unique experiences. Even if the quality wasn’t as… great? But the Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire type sites in the world really let people be creative and build their own sites. I miss those days.
It’s not like they can’t. There are plenty of options available for people to make sites that are easier and much more capable than groceries or angelfire. People don’t use them.
Thanks to Lemmy and Linux I’ve been enjoying the internet in much the same way for some time now.
I even use a desktop PC on a daily basis and it just feels right.
Well, it’s desktop PC but I have the main monitor on an arm so that it can hover over my lap while on the couch. I’m a middle aged dad and my family likes to hang out in the same room together, so it is much more practically usable for me as a couchtop.
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
It’s all about the money honey…
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
I am sure most people on lemmy are already familiar of FSF and Libre Software, I suspect most of them are linux users.
Its the majority of the non tech and lurker folks who have come to other social media who mindlessly consume content without any interaction that has converted the Internet to the cable TV which it was trying to replace as the primary form of entertainment.
They might know about free software’s corporate term “open source”, but surprisingly, most lemmy users are actually unaware of free software as they often confuse it with the corporate whitewash of open source. As for your claim, yes, I also do believe most lemmy users already use GNU+Linux, but it’s also important to go further than that by actually understanding the importance of software freedom to not only use free software, but also contribute to it in addition to teaching. Most people just stop at using another os and some free software, but it’s important to go down the more radical path by replacing all non-free software, using a fully free distribution like parabola, using a fully free bios like GNU Boot, and using ryf hardware.
The spirit of the internet was dead long before that.
It definitely desecrated the corpse, though.
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.
“Social media” is a really vague term. I think there are broadly 3 categories:
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Web2.0 social media: facebook, twitter, discord, reddit
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Forums: Old school web fora, (mastodon & lemmy?)
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Debateable social media: IRC, email chains/threads
Only the first category is relatively new and has captured the attention of the general public outside of nerds. The other two are either decentralised or are niche centralised sites. IMO it seems like the web 2.0 stuff is most problematic but not sure if it’s the hyper-centralisation or their general popularity that is the issue.
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All technology becomes degraded over time. Enshittification is real.
“I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.”
Different system, same issues.
People are people.deleted by creator
The early Internet was social media, but it wasn’t so corporatized to the point of being ruined.
To expand on that, all media with a negligible barrier to entry is social media. Which describes the internet as a whole. The commodification of such media is both unnecessary and parasitic. The only thing “social media” adds is accessibility.
Social media, at it’s heart, is inevitable. We will always find a way to share pictures, information, videos, etc. with each other. It’s such basic functionality when you really think about it. We’re social creatures and this is the most important thing we would do with technology.
The issue is specifically with platforms; how they consolidate power and who owns them.
I don’t know what to do about it, it’s one of the biggest problems we are going to continue to face in our time. I can’t really armchair solutions for it now, but I think it’s of the utmost importance that we recognize it and discuss it.
Social media is not inherently bad, it’s the platforms.
Exactly. The internet was always social, connecting people. Capitalism and greed have ruined the internet.
I don’t care if people want to make money, and I’m even fine with ads (within reason) but all this ExTrAcTiNg VaLuE is making the Internet unusable and damaging humanity.
Not social media. Capitalism.
The internet was ALWAYS social (e.g. telnet). It wasn’t ruined by people using technology to connect, it was ruined by capitalism finding new, insidious ways to monetize the human social drive.
i think the difference is that before the internet was a social mesh of countless websites.
while today it’s just a handful of social media sites.
yhea, it’s capitalism, but social media is the main tool capitalism used.
Yes, but in order to properly learn our lesson to prevent this from happening again, we need to call out the root of the problem instead of/in addition to the tools or symptoms.
i think even without capitalism, social media works better on scale (even federated social media, does so but decentralised). you will join the bigger systems, and those systems are more likely to grow if they are bigger…
they will be much less toxic without capitalism though
The “bigger systems” pre-corporate internet (and somewhat in the transition) were sometimes fairly large forums dedicated to one niche (sometimes multiple, but in the same general field). Once Reddit specifically came along after YouTube/Google laid the groundwork for the corporatization of the Internet, it centralized basically every forum to one website. Now even today, forums still exist, but it’s nowhere near what they once were.
That’s also not to mention sites like Geocities allowing basically everyone to have their own website (which of course, is another version of centralization, but with much more control given to its users).
And it’s not like corporations didn’t try to take control of the internet before 2005/2006. Just look at AOL in the 90s for a prime example, along with Flash, ActiveX/Internet Explorer, Quicktime/Realplayer browser plugins for video, etc.
Without capitalism, we would still see the internet grow, as even in the late 90s, it felt as if you were being left behind in society if you didn’t have an internet connection, but the way in which it grew would look much more akin to how it looked in the 90s and early 2000s.
The internet sure was far from perfect back then, but it was ours’.
I do miss that early internet, it was more discovery and exploration and much less doomscrolling.
and I agree that corporations destroyed it.
i realised that the response StumbleUpon cannot exist nowadays,is because internet is just a handful of sites rather than countless small ones. God StumbleUpon was superior to wherever we have now
This is why I’m finding more and more that it’s easier to find local events the “old fashioned way” (word-of-mouth, flyers, local newspapers and zines, etc) rather than through social media. It used to be easier to see events local to me, but now the algorithm pushes events that I may like but aren’t local at all. Sometimes I do actually see something local, but it’s too late.
Whenever I get overwhelmed by the modern web, I go to http://wiby.me/ and click “surprise me…”
It’s a search engine that only spits out “real” webpages that were made by people like you and me. Very refreshing.
I also like zombocom
Shoutout for https://www.marginalia.nu/ too!
Whoever it is that has kept zombo going for most of my adult life deserves a medal.
You can do ANYthing!
Anything is possible.
Thank you for sharing. It’s painful to realize in hindsight that those websites were peak internet.
They lack polish, but they were all a labour of love. No enshittification, no selling things, no corporate influence, no shit posting.
Everything had a purpose, every post took effort, and it was all about sharing experiences or knowledge.
I really miss that internet.
EDIT: correcting gibberish 🤭
Content > design
If I had a lot of money I would fund the creation of a new search engine. It would operate entirely on a white list model. And every website on it would be reviewed by people, for people. No posts from any social media site would be allowed; only small webpages. To be featured in the engine, sites would have to have verifiable human origins. So personal blogs made by real people or small businesses with actual physical addresses that can be fully verified in the real world. In order to get your business featured, you would have to apply, and someone would physically have to visit you in order to verify your authenticity. Oh, and any website that uses AI in any form would simply be ineligible to appear on the search engine.
Yes, this would result in a drastically reduced pool of potential sites, but what remains would be absolute gold.
I love the idea, but wouldn’t it be one of those old web indices (like a site or book that was just a list of other sites) with a keyword search function? Like a centralized webring with user submissions?
Yeah, I’m basically envisioning something like that. An old school web index composed entirely of human-curated human-made content. How to actually fund such an effort? I have no idea. That’s why I started with the the premise that I somehow had millions to throw at the project. It would invariably be very labor intensive.
It would probably have to be subscription funded. Maybe there’s a way to pull it off, but getting people to pay for subscriptions for services like this has long been fraught. Surveillance capitalism was built because donations don’t cut it, and no one wanted to spend a few bucks a month for Google or Facebook access.
https://neocities.org/ is great too
Saved, thanks for sharing. I just learned how geologists date rocks 😎
3rd one is obsolete now and has been replaced with affection
Needs moar webrings.
