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.
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.
One of the many benefits of not having functionality tied to profit margins and advertiser ingratiation
I still remember and miss when YouTube (and one or two music streaming services) had 5-star rating systems. Probably not as sensible for something like Reddit or Limmy, though.
Netflix switching from stars to thumbs up/down still infuriates me.
I liked the star system, too. As the site grew in popularity, people just ended up 1 or 5 starring stuff.
For the same reason - the “useful content” and “not useful content” buttons were dumbed down to “agree” and “disagree” buttons on reddit.
Agree that you can’t really ask people to use a star system for message boards. Much less microblogs.
Look, I’m all for reminiscing about “the good ole days” of YouTube, but let’s be honest - the 5-star-system was pretty useless, and was used in the same was as up/down thumbs.
You would either rate the video 5 stars or 1 star. Always.
The switch to thumbs up/down made it much more easy to judge a video. And with the green/red bar beneath, you badicslly had a more condensed star-rating.
YouTube (or rather Google) have made a lot of bad decisions regarding the platform over the years, but I sincerely think that switching to thumbs was a good change.
Agree. The only problem is that they don’t show the thumbs down. That was really good feedback.
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.
This is starting to feel like an iteration of BBS— edit: I say bbs, but really I mean Usenet. I guess this is like bbs with better threading and organization, and you login to your local mirror to see what’s new. I like it, just need to get my head around it.
Wow, 14k4 modems, those were great… after messing about with 300 and 1200 baud modems. (Never got the 300/73 one to work)
I live how the fediverse is more like the old bbs system, federative and not high-jacked by greedy corps. Maybe we’re returning to the core of public internet, before the masses swamped in.
BTW I’ll turn 51 in less then 2 months. ;) (gramps remembers… 🤣)
I forgot about my 1200 baud modem on my C64! Storage was a casset tape.
I’m younger than you, and I remember sweet chats with sysops on BBS:es and “rapid fire” message boards (one, then two, then four! replies daily), Fidonet “mailing” and then “mailing” through Usenet gateways via BBS, Gopher, LAN parties with token rings, the thrill of calling phreaked lines to call up a BBS on the other side of the Atlantic for local phone fees. Then with Internet, the Play by Email games with space strategy and fantasy. The plethora of different MUD:s with various themes and boundless optimism and plagiarism…
2400 or 14400 baud modem handshake signals still give me that thrilling feeling of freeedom and futurology. Just last year I had some of them added to my white noise list to sleep better as they also calm me down.
Your comment gave me fuzzy nice warm feelings.
I’m a little older than you and share your opinions.
I’d love to know more of this pre internet BBS. What does it stand for?
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 @CoffeeBlood91@lemmy.ca?
(I can’t believe that site is still running!)
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I just used dogpile which was all the search engines in one.
Dogpile was my favorite.
Do no evil google was pretty good.
Yahoo Directory was the bees knees.
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)
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.
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
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.
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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.
I keep seeing you everywhere, Margot Robbie. I had no idea you were so insightful or knowledgeable about tech.
In Hollywood, hot women like me just tie our hair back and put on glasses and we become professional hackers.
Haven’t you watched any CW show before?
Also, “Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.
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 😖
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.
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
discovering flashy websites
To anyone interested in this, there’s a thing called neocities.org
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.
I hope that keeping the toxic stuff away will be easier with Lemmy. I think it will because Lemmy has no central authority. Having an area of the internet that is not controlled by corporate interests who are mostly interested in money and sanitize everything to be likable by the greatest number of customers is important to all of human societies, I believe.
Yes, this! I made some of my best friends on Yahoogroups as a teenager. I felt SO alone in the world before I found out that my fandom has a whole ass community online, and it was truly magical to feel seen for the first time.
It regrettably did get toxic. And I really hope we can avoid that here, but it won’t be without intentional effort.
I really missed the early internet charoom vibes. Every day you discovered something new, every person with a random handle felt like a human connection.
I still remember the day when I first talked live to someone who lived thousands of km away from me. Was a magical moment.
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.
Guess what, I actually read the whole thing. (:
Guys we did it!
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I’m not old enough to remember the early internet, but I do feel like there’s been a shift in how I interact with the internet in the last 6 months or so. Prior to that, most of my interaction was sanitized through the channels laid out by large corporations: twitter, instagram, etc.
While I still use those platforms to an extent, it feels as if it’s become easier and easier to find interesting people and ideas that float below the broader internet waterline. They’ve certainly always been there, but I think it’s indicative of some degree of rejection of oligarchic centralized platforms in favor of more democratic systems of interaction. It’s early days, but the large platforms are showing their cracks and I think it’s possible that more traffic could be diverted from them to places like Lemmy.
Personally, my problem with the more centralized platforms are that their adoption is so widespread that it becomes overwhelming to break in. So many opinions are flying around that it’s impossible to engage in a meaningful way. The advantage of smaller platforms like Lemmy or kbin is that it’s easier to engage and build community. As they grow, they’ll have to figure out how to preserve that aspect, but I think their engineering provides an inherent advantage that other platforms lack.
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.
