Fediverse

Software developers are on Mastadon, though. Big time.

The internet itself was once a niche alternative to mainstream knowledge

The way I see it is, that we are all good or even experts at something. The internet is not only about programming alone. The frustration comes from people who 30 years ago spent time discussing and sharing all kinds of knowledge on websites, forums or wikis but now, large corporations charge money to present the same knowledge more conveniently, but not always in the right context

This includes programming, but also gardening, how to ferment cabbage, how to clean a smoking pipe, what to feed guinea pigs.

It is definitely doable, but will take many decades

bows deeply

You checked out Neocities yet? I've been thinking of signing up.

We thank you for your service.

Yeah... That shit with ICANN and Autistici kinda raises some red flags now though...

God what i would do for Nokias to be viable again. I actually still have my old 6085. Looks brand new, still gets 2 weeks of battery. If it wasn't for banking apps I would still be using that thing

Nope. You got the time period right, but I would like to posit it’s when they started letting our Parents, drunk uncles and dumb ass aunties on Facebook.

The problem always has, and always will be, Facebook.

/fistclench

We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good,

The WWW was built for everyone.

We let rich assholes steal it out of laziness.

Take for example, Facebook vs MySpace or similar. Making a Facebook is instant, making a MySpace took effort. Setting up a subreddit is instant and free and gets you an immediate registered audience, setting up a vBulletin or similar forum is time-consuming and costs money and getting any traffic is an uphill battle. Same thing with posting- on Reddit just mozy on over to that sub and hit post, on a forum you have to register. Or you want to make videos? Gotta pay for a decent web hosting plan, lots of bandwidth, and deal with encoding, playback scripts, etc. Or just make a YouTube and hit 'upload'.

So we let big platforms take over the Internet. We gained a fuckton of features and convenience. We didn't consider what we lost- creativity, and the independence of not having to make everything advertiser-friendly.

Monetization is the other frenemy. It's great that creators can get paid for their work easily. But what we lose with that is every creator pandering to the algorithm, every video begs 'like comment and subscribe!', videos shy away from advertiser-unfriendly topics, and the kid filter brainrot is starting to infect common lexicon ('my brother got caught watching corn and now he's gonna unalive himself with a pewpew' type nonsense).

For that reason I think decentralization and federation are the way out.

Look at forums for example- one of the biggest barriers to entry was registration, getting people to care enough to bother registering. Lemmy fixes that, and you can still make a community as closed and private as you want.

I'm hoping a new group of websites will spring up from this. My only fear is they will all drown in a sea of AI slop.

The bit we should regret is that we let the rich corporates steal it.

It was not sold. It was taken/stolen

LGBT40+

What about us 20 somethings who vaguely remember the good ol days as they were fading away?

Lawyer: You can't divorce your wife, just because she's a bit odd.

Micky: I said, she's fucking Goofy!