I was going down memory lane, I graduated in 96. But Internet culture of the mid 2000s to mid 2015. Seemed like there was always some stand out video or event ranging from chocolate rain video, nyan cat, amazing horse, I like turtles, why does the Internet seem so stale lately? I just realized a lot of this fun stuff stopped around 2014 or became less prevalent the closer we get to events that started dividing us, like gamergate, Trump canidancy in 2015. God this last decade has just sucked and it just keeps getting worse. How did we go to so much hope and promise to where we are now? Even reddit sucks now
Big Tech ruined it.
Even the Fediverse can’t entirely heal the damage that Meta and Twitter caused by walling everything off, for example.
I mean, the Fediverse is a good way to fight back against the likes of Meta and Twitter, at least on the face of it, but its userbase is niche at best.
As great as the Fediverse and Lemmy in particular are, I’d honestly prefer if this place kept being niche. Not that I don’t want more people to enjoy online freedom away from corporate owned social media, but I fear that a surge of people migrating to Lemmy would cause the capitalists to turn their gaze over here and find ways to attack it or hijack it. The Fediverse does have its own defenses against these practices, it being completely open source and decentralized being the most important one, but it still wouldn’t be a good thing to have their attention and consent manufacturing bot farms etc. entering here for example