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.

    • @HulkSmashBurgers@lemmy.world
      1•1 year ago

      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.

      This to me is the worst part of the enshittification of reddit. All that human interaction and knowledge base is “owned” and controlled by a profit driven entity. Reddit hasn’t done it yet, but I think the time is approaching when they gatekeep all that data behind a login, which will prevent it from showing up in google searches.

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

      Lemmy is only four years oldand will continue to get better. There will be other projects (kbin, plebbit to name a few) trying to accomplish the same thing as lemmy, exploration is good. It’s an exciting time for social media.

      • @SterlingVapor@lemmy.world
        2•1 year ago

        Plus, the bones are good - it doesn’t do everything, but what it does it does surprisingly efficiently and robustly. And there’s the rest of the fediverse for most of it - Lemmy doesn’t need to handle messages, there’s matrix for that (there’s even a matrix ID on the user definitions)

        There’s definitely more to be done, like user migration and modtools, but a lot of the shortcomings are in the client. And now that it caught so much attention, you’re going to see a lot of apps and different web interfaces very soon

        It’s kind of incredible what you can do on the client side too since there’s no company trying to keep you reliant on them. I’m building an app, and while I’m prioritizing getting it out ASAP, I’m looking through the data and imagining what I can build on top of it. Especially when the rest of the fediverse is taken into account.

        It’s like a new Internet built on top of the one stolen from us

      • @SowetoNecklace@lemmy.world
        1•1 year ago

        I remember thinking AltaVista was the absolute best search engine for no particular reason, and being willing to die on that hill.

        (I did not, in fact, die on that hill)

    • 🅿🅸🆇🅴🅻
      0•1 year ago

      For one, “before Google was a thing” comment. It was popular very quickly and was not the first search engine

      Depends on the country and the rate of internet penetration. I think I used Altavista a long time until I’ve heard of Google, at a time when Google was probably popular in the US. And before that, not knowing what a search engine is, I leaned about sites by typing links from newspapers.

      Discord is the PERFECT example of a wrong turn down the wrong path. All I ask is stop making me use it to find information on your open source projects.

      I now feel guilty of nuking my every comment and post on Reddit. They deserve it, but there are also users I helped and might of helped in the future with my answers. Not on open source projects of course, but general help with apps, services and configuration. Then again, Reddit wasn’t the ideal place to ask for help anyway.

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

      I feel you on this one too.