both companies notably ruined the internet in the 2010s by consolidating discourse then taking various steps to destroy the user experience and the feel of the communities for profit.
so, broadly, the web went from cozy, small hobby forums in the 90s and 00s, then with the 10s as a transitional period, the 20s being practically complete corporate control of online discourse.
it’s a bummer. but nothing lasts forever. where will we go next?
I’m here. I don’t know about everybody else though.
I’m about 38% installed.
There’s a big diaspora right now.
If the fediverse can get more user-friendly instead of being a bunch of programming linuxites lying that their stuff is totally intuitive, it could be a lovely new home with lots of flexibility.
a bunch of programming linuxites lying that their stuff is totally intuitive
This is my least favorite part of the fediverse. I’m pretty tech savvy, and the jump to Mastodon when Elon took over and Lemmy when apps stopped working wasn’t easy. Having to pick an instance to sign up with was a huge roadblock for me.
Although part of the difficulty is that if you’re coming from a centralised place like Reddit, Fediverse takes a bit to wrap your head around. Lemmy had a whole issue going for a while, where people logically flocked to the largest instance that they could find, possibly out of the misunderstanding that you had to pick and choose an instance.
The Internet does not care is the bottom line. Both are still large platforms. Should they stop existing in the distant future, nothing really will happen, people find new ways to waste their time or find 1:1 copies of what they miss.
There’s no shortage of cess pools
IRC, duh!
Right now Discord, Slack, and other chat platforms seem to be becoming dominant. But now everything is not only locked away from the open web, but also ephemeral.
Mastodon seems to be doing pretty well and continuing to grow. Lemmy seems to have been stagnant for many months now though. I guess we’re waiting on Reddit to piss their users off about something again before we’ll see another surge here.
Something yet worse.
Eventually Justin Timberlake will overpay for them
Probably will be decided by Gen Alpha. Once interest rates come down maybe Skibidi Toilet will start a social network and that will get lots of quick attention followed by VC funding and eventually we’ll all be yes-yessing each other’s dum dums.
Hopefully people will start going back to independent forums. Google just added a “forums” tab at the top of their search, so they seem to want that too. It’s not good for them that so much information is private on chat programs like Discord, other big social media sites, and concentrated on Reddit.
Lemmy never shows up in search results for me despite some instances having good domain authority, but more people should start using it when it starts showing up.
Maybe to something more personally controlled, like everyone has a “server”(for feeds, “facebook”, etc etc that they like to do) and connects to what ever they want.
More ease of use ofc greatly needed.
Geocities?
Anyways, that would be interesting. There coupd even be a website that indexes all the personal sites. It could even highlight interesting things from those sites. Perhaps it would even organize those interests into sub groups that you can follow and keep up to date on new information added to those sites.
