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.
That’s a pretty good timeline. However, as someone born in the very early 80s, I have a couple thoughts.
For one, “before Google was a thing” comment. It was popular very quickly and was not the first search engine. So I’m not sure what kind of context a 8 year old ( based on your age ) would have on the internet before Google. I remember before Google. I remember AOL v1.x , prodigy, the first web browser and using local dial up BBS’ hosted by the local news papers. Certainly doesn’t go back as far as some people, but I had a very clear before Google understanding.
Another would be Facebook. It used to require a college email. It was incredible. A space only for college kids. I’d argue Facebook died for a lot of us by 2005-6. Whenever open registration occurred. I liked MySpace because it was like a interactive profile page and nothing more. There wasn’t a whole lot of pressure. It was a way to let someone find you. Kind of like handing out a digital business card.
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.
I have news for you all. It’s probably going to all get a lot worse far before it ever gets better. Discord’s rise in popularity is one. FOR ALL THAT IS HOLY! KIDS! PLEASE STOP USING DISCORD AS A PLACE FOR DOCUMENTATION AND SUPPORT ON PROJECTS. This isn’t some kind of problem that needed a discord as the solution. I don’t care if you want to use it for chatting and discussions and gaming ( matrix is a thing btw), but leave the documentation and technical stuff in a git repo where it belongs.
Bringing this full circle. Federated apps feel like the correct next steps. I think this path is the correct one.
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)
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.
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.
I feel you on this one too.
That’s a good point!
I only used open source as an example because it’s the most ridiculous. Discord had no payment model for years. How exactly do people think they payed the bills? Do people actually think their conversations are private? I’m talking both voice and chat.
I don’t agree. Web forms are the perfect place to ask for help. That’s one of the main issue with what Reddit is doing. Feels like they might take 15 years worth of help and support and lock it behind an app.
I am enjoying Lemmy. I love seeing improvements everyday and I can’t wait for some smart kid out there to make all this fediverse stuff really work together in ways we may not have even thought about yet. It’s a great start but it needs a coding artist :) to really bring it all together in a way that will attract the rest of the population.
The barrier to entry is what keeps these communities healthy.
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.
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