The internet is great again, thanks to all of you 🙂
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.
That was when I decided to drop it. Recommendations worked so much better for me back then, regardless of how many people say it didn't actually work.
As much as people refuse to accept it, there does exist a middle point in life of "It's okay".
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 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.
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 @[email protected]?
(I can't believe that site is still running!)
Oh man, frog in a blender! You bring back memories.
Now to go see if elf bowling is still a thing...
Oh man, I remember that! Think I had a standalone .exe of that somewhere.
Look I'm spinning, I'm spinning!
I'm not saying Lemmy is going backwards, but I prefer this forum vibe I am experiencing here with people expressing their opinions and helping each other.
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.
Yes, I saw that documentary "Swordfish" about hot women hackers.
Who knew this digital image of Margot Robbie would be active on Lemmy! You'd think she would be busy with promoting Barbie.
This is beautiful and true.
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 1,200 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.
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.
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 300/75 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.
Mine was on a 386SX-16, never had the need to put the Atari STe on internet. (And had an MSX when I lived with my parents in '85, no clue about BBs'es then)
I had an IBM 386sx with a 15" monitor.
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?
@Labotomized
BBS - bulletin board system
1970s-80s
a person would run a server (often from home) and people would dial in over a regular phone line and browse the forum(bbs) and leave a text message. If you had one phone line only one person could log in at a time. you might wait weeks for someone to reply to your message. Both ends needed a modem to encode decode from digital to analog and back.
[sent from the microverse(mastodon)]
Dial in with a computer and leave a typed message, not like SMS text messaging.
Some BBSs had a communication system called FIDOnet that would dial up back and forth in a hierarchy at night to update their forums. You could personally run something called a point on fidonet that was analogous to running an instance yourself on Lemmy. I ran a point in the early 90s.
Ahh Usenet. That's where I'd find my first internet porn back in like '94/'95
..I think. Christ it's been a while.
an accurate summation of my thoughts on the matter as well - the active communities (not the ones that get created because they were big on reddit but have no content here) are the ones I like - there's intriguing posts, insightful comments, actual conversation instead of toxic arguing.
lemmy is like a breath of fresh air.
yeah - it's really easy to create a community but extremely difficult to foster it and make it grow - even if you're just dumping loads of content into it on a daily basis, if there's no interaction then it's... not a waste of time, but perhaps next closest thing.
I havent managed to find something that I'm passionate about that doesnt already exist, so I just contribute to those communities that I can, as I find them.
set your default sort option in preferences to Subscribed / New - then you wont get bombed by new posts as the various instances feed/federate. it'll still screw up occasionally but it occurs much less often (and then you just force refresh the page to set it back to "normal").
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.
The barrier to entry is what keeps these communities healthy.
My fingers were itching to contribute to the Lemmy repo but I have zero knowledge of Rust.
I would have loved to see communities grouping (as a user setting), account data export, GDPR deletion request, account migration to another instance, user following / add as friend, comment with reason for user / community block, link scraper / previews for posts, etc. I'll have to be patient and let the devs hopefully tackle these some day.
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
I just used dogpile which was all the search engines in one.
Dogpile was my favorite.
As a kid, I thought it was the funniest thing ever lol
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)
Fido net was best net
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.
This is the better internet.
@UpChuck @CoffeeBlood91 Make Internet Great Again
The internet was taken over by wall street. The fediverse is a revolt against that.
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 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.
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.
Good ol AOL chat rooms.. need to bring those back too
a/s/l?
/S drop
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.
Definitely. This place is a (much needed) step back to what the internet used to be. Somewhere between 15-20 years ago and now, the online growth experienced obviously went in a wrong direction. I'm glad these huge social media conglomerations were a testing ground for us to discover how the web should not work, and Lemmy is a step in the right direction.
It can't last. Right now, lemmy/ActivityPub is in the "early adopter" stage of the tech hype cycle. The only people here now are the people who are willing to try out something new. If there are enough "early adopters", Lemmy will become interesting, and then the normal people will follow. This would lead to an "eternal September" effect of declining quality. Then they're followed by the spammers and people looking to make a profit.
If basically feels like reinventing Usenet, with maybe some extra modern features.
There's one big weakness. There appears to be some sort of shared blocklist. If people wind up being placed on the list for petty reasons rather than genuine misbehavior, that could become a problem. I.e., the people maintaining the blocklist decide they disagree with X politically, and then X winds up on the blocklist even though they really weren't abusive. Then people running nodes are going to have to start manually reviewing the blocklist and making exceptions, which most people won't bother doing.
This has been the way of Internet communities since the Internet started, really. So I don't think anyone (OP included) really believes this whole wild-frontier, brave-new-world kind of deal will last long. But having gone from MySpace to Facebook to Reddit to here, having a new platform at least gives me hope that there will always be a new one to jump to when the current one really turns to crap.
Folks have been saying this about Mastodon for years and it's only grown. Facebook's now looking at investing in ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard for federation on the internet and the amount of apps supporting it is only growing.
I think probably the most bleak thing that could happen is that maybe Lemmy has a smaller user base and only a small amount of people convert over from Reddit. But even then I'm kinda happy with that. I like what I'm doing on here and I like the community so far. And I could deal with a smaller set of communities that are ad-free, have a pretty great experience, etc. etc.
Jimbo Wales from Wikipedia said "It takes 5 users to keep a website active". For the foreign-language Wikipedia clones, the ones that had at least 5 users did well. The ones that didn't have 5 users just died.
I did actually check if Usenet activity was back up, at least on the groups I used to be active on back in the day... unfortunately, nope.
I don't know how to use usenet except for piracy 😞 and even then it was confusing as hell. But it does sound cool to use bulletin-board software from before there was bulletin-board software.
To some degree, isn't everything just reinventing something with some extra features? Discord is just IRC
Typically, the clients for discussions were fairly different from the binaries-only clients used today. Microplanet Gravity and 40tude Dialog were the big ones back then. Nowadays, only a few are maintained, but if you're interested, I recommend Pan (or slrn if you're comfortable with text mode). Finding active discussion newsgroups is a challenge on the modern Usenet though, it feels like trying to find a few survivors around the ruins of abandoned groups. A huge advantage of Usenet back in the day was when using dial-up internet, which used up your home phone line at the time. There were some parts of the world where you paid a flat monthly rate, but in mine and most others you paid by the minute. Using Usenet clients, as well as POP3 clients for email, you'd just connect to the internet, download everything and disconnect, then read everything, write your answers, reconnect to the internet and send/receive. Very efficient, and one of the reasons why despite some issues it had it held up until the 1-2-3 punch of the mass adoption of high-speed internet, social networks, and modern form of smartphones. Email is probably the only surviving old protocol that is despite webification still used by a large amount of people directly using separate clients. In a way, Usenet and IRC were also just that, protocols, with free and open source implementations. Back then most servers were maintained by ISPs and educational institutions, and sort of like Lemmy, your local Usenet server would also sync up with big groups out there. Discord is, again, a singular service - at risk of enshittification and failure, like Reddit, and any tech company. To me, federated and decentralized stuff like Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix etc. does seem to have a lot of a spirit and resiliency of old-school ideas we had with Usenet and IRC back in the day. The biggest hurdle back then (and now, for fediverse) is getting a critical mass of regular people on here, not just free software enthusiasts or early adopters. It's something that major social networks are very, very good at.
Each instance has a list showing what it is and isn't federated to. I've never heard of a shared block list.
Look at any site and append /instances to the main Url.
Lemmy.world/instances
Re: Blocklist - make accounts on multiple instances.
Is there a way to find out a site's blocklist?
Append /instances to their main URL like lemmy.world/instances
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
Guess what, I actually read the whole thing. (:
Guys we did it!
Wi did it
redditlemmy!I'm also noticing a satisfying lack of the /s tag.
I really liked the /s tag. /s
I wonder why that is. Do older users just not tend to joke that way as much?
I guess I'm older but I feel like it ruins it. The context matters most and I'd rather add context than a tag if I have to. Part of the joke is people missing the context when it's obvious to others. I'm not sure there's much point in sarcasm if you're spelling it out.
Dissecting a joke is like dissecting a frog. It’s not funny and the frog dies.
Adding the /s is like saying "I just told a joke." ... with sarcasm, well it's kinda like saying the punchline.
It's more like "I just told a joke, don't downvote me!"
Honestly I think the older you get the more you slow down and enjoy the basic things.
Sarcasm is for the young
I've always thought /s (when not overused) can be pretty helpful in determining the intent someone is saying if it is ambiguous.
There isnt any tone in text, as opposed to speech, and sarcasm is heavily dependent on
howyou say the sentence.I miss IRC!
It still exists, though small and weak! It can be and is bridged to discord.
Yuck!
I shan't deny the yuck of it.
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.
I'm 20 years older than the poster. I've just started exploring in the last week, but I'm totally in love with the whole Fediverse thing. I'm already subscribed to a bunch of stuff all over and it's amazing. I'm not participating much yet, but I absolutely love to see these spaces evolve and read the conversations across a wide spectrum of subjects among passionate people. Everyday that goes by confirms that we (or I at the very least) do not need Reddit. Like, at all.
On kbin I only seem to see federated lemmy threads though. Are those mentioned yet to be added or how does that work?
It’s such a nice breath of fresh air that I really didn’t know I needed. But now, looking back, it’s so obvious things weren’t the way they should be. And here, in the fediverse, things feel like they are exactly how they should be! It’s so nice!
To anyone interested in this, there's a thing called neocities.org
I LOVE THIS
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.
I’ll further date myself… we all had our own Geocities webpage back in 2000/2001…
When I first got online, I used Lynx (an entirely text-based browser).
I still use it to test websites for accessibility at work. It's a great way to visualise what a screenreader might see.
Hello my future girlfriend days lol. Man those were good times
Funny how it feels like the old forums isn't it?
I'm glad we found this place.
My biggest worry is that it becomes over moderated like all the subreddits.
I fucking hated writing a heated passionate post, only to have it automatically removed because I didn't read the fine print.
I prefer when everything is voted on in the community, vs automatic removals and strict mod's.
It actually took my motivation away to post, so I ended up just being a lurker.
The fact that there are so many Lemmy servers makes me feel as if one server goes to shit, there will be another one that offers more freedom of expression.
I also enjoy that that there is a specific instance for NSFW content, it keeps things organized.
OMG, writing a lengthy post just to get in auto-removed sucks so hard...
I actually now feel like engaging in discussion again. Isn't it funny? I guess all my negative experiences with Reddit just shut me up on there.
I'm hoping that mods will be fine.
I literally stopped to write answers on stackoverflow.com decade ago because mods were fixing my bad english (it's another story) and always somehow kicked me for it.
That's kinda why I joined Reddit originally. I couldn't really work with platforms like Twitter or Facebook that are sort of about "me". I just aren't that egocentric. I don't want to post daily shit about my life, and I also don't really have an interest in reading about private daily lives of others. Reddit always felt like a classical forum, but adapted to have more of a constantly moving content. You were part of a computer / tech forum? Now you'd join some subreddits about this topic and be informed while also able to partake in discussions about it. Same for everything else.
I never wanted all that drama from the extremistic sides (remember T_D dominating /r/all through vote manipulation? Or "uncensored news"?), I never wanted the sluggish & bloated redesign with its thousands of awards and distracting animations, I never wanted mods & admins / AEO to turn abusive and / or completely incompetent (literally all my bans have been within the past few years, which was the minority of all my total Reddit time). And now they think they can dictate the content that once made them great & brought them to the point where they are now. If they cannot find a way to work with the users, then the users should stop working for them. Simple as that. Because in the end it's the user base that made the platform great and filled it with content.
I'm much younger so I never really got to use these smaller forums, I grew up with a centralised and corporate internet where everyone used the same handful of websites. And then began the enshittification. All the sites I used started getting worse with every update so I stopped using them one by one, with the most recent one being reddit. Moving to the fediverse made me realise just how little I was actually enjoying those sites. I wasn't browsing them for content or for discussion, I was browsing them because I was addicted. Uninstalling the apps and deleting my accounts has done wonders for my mental health, and the smaller community here is so much nicer and more welcoming than the toxic ocean that is social media.
It's interesting how different the perspective of a youngin' who starting using the internet after corporations had already gotten their hands on it is. Heck, even you notice the difference between now and 5 years ago.
Something isn't adding up here. 32? Joined Facebook in 2005? Facebook, until 2006, required a valid college (in the American sense) email address. Being 32 would put your high school graduation in the neighborhood of 2009. So did you go to college ~4 years early, sneak on, or do I have something wrong in my timeline?
I was thinking the same, I remember being peeved I couldn't get on Facebook in 2005, because I was only in community college, and therefore not fancy enough to join.😆
Regardless, it's a nice sentiment. Every time I sign on I find myself smiling with how neat this community is.
Maybe they did post-secondary in high school. That would give you a college email.
Hadn't thought of that!
I had facebook a little early but that was like 2008, when I was in high school and snuck on via an older sibling or something
Nah, your timeline seems pretty right. My brother is 30's and was out of Highschool about 2010 if I remember correctly. Maybe this guy is a genius and skipped highschool? Lol
As around the same age, FB around 2008 but it definitely was myspace before then, you weren't "cool" without one, so it's possible the timeline is misremembered?
Internet forums that were based on phpBB and other popular scripts were one of the best parts of the internet that Reddit and Facebook shamelessly killed with the applause of the netizens. Centralization of those forums was a huge regression and it felt like we went to a point that was worse than Web 1.0. I feel like Lemmy is a return of that forum culture that made the internet great.
I posted a toot on Mastodon back in November during the whole Twitter fiasco saying how Mastodon in 2022 felt like Twitter did circa 2010. Same feeling for Lemmy / Kbin!
On Reddit I always felt like a raindrop in an ocean. I'm just one of way too many, and very little of what I wrote was ever seen or engaged with. That was discouraging at times, especially when I put plenty of thought or research into my reply, only for it to have no engagement while typical low-effort replies like "this!" Or "I'm a simple person I see x I updoot" always rise to the top. It was starting to feel like all the other social media I've quit over the years, and I was originally there because it felt like a forum, not social media. I'm on kbin now and I'm getting the feeling I got from posting on forums like Playstation Underground when I was younger. I even recognize user avatars across different threads and magazines/communities, which definitely reminds me of forums of old. Who knows what it will become but the federated nature of it means it can feel as big or small as I want it to, which is what is keeping me invested.
Agreed. kbin has been thoroughly enjoyable so far, to the point that I kinda hope it remains a small, niche thing. I loved forums and smaller communities when I was younger in the early-mid 2000's, and this really is the first time I've been able to capture that feeling again since. I'm glad reddit is run by an egomaniacal dickhead, because without him, I'd never have gone looking for something better. It feels like people are slowly, but surely becoming tired of the 'corporate centralized internet', and are looking to branch out to smaller, but more meaningful free communities.
I'm actually excited for the first time in almost 10 years.
I've been thinking of going complete 2003 and going back to flip phones. I'm just tired of the greed over wanting me to see ads. I fucking can't stand ads and go out of my way to avoid them, including monthly memberships like YouTube red. Reddit was trying to force me to use their app so they can collect more data to show me ads.
imo, simplifying your digital life is completely worth it. I personally have no social media outside of this site, have ads blocked on all my devices, use Brave as my browser (it has its issues, but for the most part, it does what I need it to), use GrapheneOS instead of Android, use ProtonMail instead of Gmail, and access YouTube through a NewPipe fork that integrates SponsorBlock, use Signal as my messenger (or SMS otherwise.) This generally has kept me from doomscrolling and wasting my mental energy throughout the day, and now that I no longer have a reddit account, I'm even better off than I was before.
At some point I realized that life with so many modern conveniences and centralized power just made me unhappy. I absolutely believe there's merit to the idea that not everything needs to be made as easy and accessible as possible. Humans need time away from the internet, and they need some kind of challenge, even if it's as simple as needing to use SMS instead of Facebook Messenger, or have an algorithm shove what it THINKS you want to see in your face 24/7.
Anyway, I'm rambling. Basically, I agree with you haha
I just did the same thing with youtube, switched to piped and now I purely engage through the subscription feed. Fuck the algorithms, I decide what I want to watch!
You can still use the YouTube app to find stuff, but click share - - > Newpipe Sponsorblock. Sometimes it's nice to have your subscriptions available.
This is exactly how I felt on reddit! With Kbin I feel more at "home", with reddit I felt distant, the same with most other social media platforms. I feel like me and others feel less stressed when contributing to a discussion here compared to how I felt on reddit.
It feels calmer here now that I think about it. I think being part of the huge swarm and trying to stand out and made things feel pretty hectic at times.
Oh man that was annoying when that happened. So many times.
Man this takes me back... I also remember the early days of the internet, browsing it on my dad's computer. I miss these dumb times.
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 😖
Good conversations on kbin, Lemmy, Squabbles, et al. I think there's a new feeling of solidarity and ownership with these new (to some of us) forums. I'm here for it.
Solidarity and ownership… fellowship… it’s beautiful.
That this collection of people who are so often omni-belligerent have found common cause is wild to me
Is there anything here in the lemmiverse that prevents bot activity?
An account has to specifically change a setting on their profile so it can be a bot, so maybe people can use something to filter on that.
Is it actually some kind of switch to activate the bot account, or is that setting just for transparency sake?
My take on it was that it was just flag you can set to openly identify the account as a bot, but nothing to prevent either a human or bot from lying. There's bot disclosure laws in progress in the EU and California in some form, so it may be future proofing, too.
Yes, that was my take too. I wish Australia would start moving on some of these sort of laws already. We still have very lax data privacy/retention laws and such ... our pollies definitely ain't thinking about protecting the public from AI chat bots!
You don't have to enable that, it's just something you do to identify your bot.
Hopefully lemmy and kbin devs will implement measures to control bots.
Currently, kind of but not really.
Admins are reporting that they are getting bulk new account creations, with telltale markers of the less sophisticated types of bot accounts. So the locks, doors and windows are being actively tested as we speak.
Right now (as is my understanding) admin options include requiring confirmation of a valid email, using filter questions (meaning someone has to read and manually approve each registration), and implementing captchas.
Bots are coming. They’re here already. I sadly don’t know enough about it to be helpful, but I really hope the huge dev/sec community here is able to come up with better tools to detect and protect against them.
Honestly the lack of the karma requirement should prevent bit reposts
I would think there's got to be some sort of spam protection operating, at the very least.
I'm sure the programers have stuff up their sleeves.
AI is our biggest threat, it's gotten to be easy for AI to be trained to use the internet and engage in discussion. I just hope when that stuff exponetially takes off, it doesn't invade Lemmy.
AI is much like an invasive species, but rather than in nature, it's online.
Cyberwar incoming? Who's to know.
Indeed, I was just engaged in a similar discussion on another thread, and pointed out the retro feel of discovering a new, blossoming internet community - and the fact that there are seemingly real people behind the posts here. At the moment, I think that all that's protecting us is that we are not yet on the radar of conversational bots, nor big enough to be of interest YET. I do think the decentralised platform is a very clever idea for social networking, and yes, I hope the devs have some ideas to combat the inevitable incoming AIs.
They will definitely to ban bot activity. On Reddit bots became sort of accepted, if they can atleast moderate automatic post activity, that is a start.
My biggest concern is for when the bots can post on an untimely matter at random instances.
I could litterally be a bit just replying to posts at a natural human pace, based off of some sort of Redditors writing style if you catch my drift.
I am sure it's just a matter of time. AI detectors are good, but not that good. It will get to the point where the most believable posts are the ones with spelling mistakes and poor grammar, Infact human error would make for a good watermark.
It is great again! Mastodon was cool but lemmy is epic!
My only real problem with Mastodon is its presentation of material. Never really liked Twitter, didn’t like the individual focus. This? I like. Interests are abstracted from the individual.
I’m a bit older and remember all of that and then some. The CEO-free Fediverse really does bring back a vibe of those good ok’ days of the internet (but with way better technology). Hopefully the recent events will help us all stay grounded and alert to ensure that this doesn’t get enshitified too. We have to remember that we, the users, are the value of any social media. Without us submitting content and putting our eyes on them, these sites are useless and worthless.
This is a great Reddit alternative. I hope Federated platforms win over. Centralized BS is just no good! It does not work well, it is very focused on profit as well.
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.
This is exactly how I feel! So excited to be part of it.
Right? Being on kbin makes me feel like a teenager hanging out on forums again, it's nice
This is my first time feeling part of an online community, it's amazing!
I'm a few years younger, but my sentiments are the same. I became a denizen of the Internet towards the end of the golden era of forums.
Due to scepticism, I didn't join Reddit until fairly late (~2018).
It didn't quite feel the same, but it did scratch the itch - but over the last few years it did feel like it was changing into something else. Quality content was getting buried under a sea of bot-generated reposts, and the sense of community kind died off. I ended up becoming quite the lurker towards the end.
Being here has awoken that old forum user in me, and while I may not be great at generating posts, it has made me want to reply and comment to stuff again.
what is this website exactly? is it something new that was made in response to the Reddit API stuff? or has it already been around a while
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html
I'm about your age, and I have to wholeheartedly agree. Lemmy has that old forum vibe and I'm all for it.
You moved me.
this is cute
I have the same feeling. Sometimes not being the popular option seems to be the best 😀 I do want the fediverse to grow but I hope we will have the tools and features to retain this level of groundedness that we see today.
Yes, it does feel a bit like that!
I first experienced the "world wide web" in 1995. I'm not saying it's exactly like that, but in some way kbin reminds me of earlier simpler times on the web. I've only been on here for two days.
Best way I can describe it: really feels like the start of something.
my first ISP was EarthLink 😀
I definitely feel like the posts talking about Reddit here are few and far between. And guess what…? You don’t have to read them. But you do you.
We did it Fediverse!
Yeah, ever since I first arrived on kbin, I’ve felt like a breeze is passing through me. It took me a while to realize, but then it hit me: it’s because I’m not enraging Redditors every day by just opening my mouth.
I'm 29 and I completely share your vibes 😅
I grew up late to the early internet days as I am just about as old as google itself. However, even in my time I remember light saber mouse cursors, neo colored backgrounds, the stupid but adorable fairy animations all over myspace, and websites auto playing Queen songs. There was character that we put it as a community.
While I may not be the biggest fan of the flat design of the lemmy website and how clinical it all seems, the FOSS nature leads to so much customization with apps and so forth while the content y'all produce is absolutely magical. If I see an ad I know it's cause one of you have something unique to actually show off and it's not just bots pushing me to open my wallet. Thank you, you lovely bunch of adorable dufuses.
I'm so old, my google email address is my actual name.
I'm pretty sure mine is available but I still opted to use a period and birth year. That said I have/had many fake name google, yahoo, and AOL emails so I'm a mixed bag.
Hear, hear! pounds table with fist Lemmy and Mastodon are restoring my faith in social media and hopefully more people consciously make the move away from corporate platforms whose algorithms and advertising cause considerably more harm than good. Kudos Lemmy devs!