Yeah man. Last time YouTube was good was when people were making videos just for fun, not for clout.

Don’t be silly, the proletariat just needs to unite, seize the nuclear stockpiles of at least two nations capable of destroying all life on earth in defense of the oligarchy’s hoards, and then decentralize ownership of the global communication infrastructure.

Easy.

Love that last line. Will remember.

This pretty much. It got ‘civilized’

Yes, selfhost most essential services like mail, messengers, web search, piped frontend, vpn, and other things like gitea/forgejo and jellyfin, web 3.0 will be federated network

I help pay for my instance to operate, and it’s a cost I’m happy to help shoulder.

The Fediverse is a bit more like the old USENET days in some regards, but ultimately if it ever becomes more popular the same assholes that ruin other online experiences will also wind up here.

What made the Internet more exciting 30 years ago was that it was mostly comprised of the well educated and dedicated hobbyists, who had it in their best interest to generally keep things decent. We didn’t have the uber-lock-in of a handful of massive companies running everything.

It’s all Eternal September. There’s no going back at this point — any new medium that becomes popular will attract the same forces making the current Internet worse.

Ehhhh, the OG internet connected better because all nodes were well connected. The Fediverse is a series of single servers that can’t even sync all data across themselves. It’s cute, but it’s post-it notes on strings atm

Yep we have different lemmy/mastodon/etc… instances talking with one another. Anyone can set up something like activityhub. Its a fun place in my opinion!

No. The fediverse is just more of the same mindless gargling and regurgitation of mainstream media excrement that the internet has become, but federated.

It lacks the creativity, originality, experimentation, wonder, sheer life of the old internet.

It’s just as dead, enshittified, and riddled with misinformation bots as everything else.

It’s not unless you are operating your own instance.

We would be better than ever, if not for the normification.

Indeed, Reddit was a great example of this. All of the stupid things they tried to pull off in the past few years (selling user data, turning off the API, insulting their users, VPN blocking, to name a few) would have not worked when they were a growing website. Now that they have so many low quality users, they can do that successfully because they know that said users are too dumb to realize how they’re being abused. Even larger websites like Twitter and Facebook operate this way.

The takeaway here is: don’t focus on having many users, focus on having good users. All relationships are a two-way street, and if you’re on the side of the street with too many people, you don’t have any personal leverage on your own. It’s in your best interests to get out of that relationship.

Cyberpunk, let’s go 😂

A few of us still remembers option 3) Regulation And also 4) Properly working anti-trust laws.

It isn’t just corporations that have ruined everything, it’s spammers and scammers and cybercriminals too. Searching any topic these days is a crapshoot, with a high likelihood of falling into a spammer’s tarpit.

To me it feels like the internet is evolving into a virtual Dark Forest. We float around in these little bubbles of sanity, hiding amid a yawning expanse of seething chaos.

I’ve said before and I’ll say again. I would use the option on amazon for shipping that says “let your employees pee”. I get my package 2-3 days later. Oh well. I don’t give a shit. I’d rather normalize companies treating people like people. And if I get my limited edition pez dispenser 3 days later, so be it.

Not like it’s an oxygen tank.

1 can be solved with regulation or nationalization. Services online should be public services. Like school, police, roads. You can still have private alternatives too.

History tells us there’s also a release valve of a swift brick to the side of the head, one brick per billionaire.

It sounds messier than paying taxes, to me. But I’m not a billionaire, so I can’t say I understand their motives.

im doing 2 actually.

Someone showed me this and it’s the closest I’ve seen to the way the internet used to be lol

Shows a different site every click

https://wiby.me/surprise/

I’m very much onboard with this. Idk if I’d say it’s the libraries job though, I think it should be at the city level for community instances.

It’s fascinating how the absolute majority of people is trying to solve both social and technical problems at the same time via only social or only technical means. Again and again.

You need both.

Fediverse works right for moderation, but technically communities and users are part of an instance, and an instance is a physical thing that may go down. Just like most of our Web has vanished. And also, of course, it uses Web technologies.

Further my idea as to what should be done about this (one approach is Nostr, unloved here because of people who use it ; I also think it’s too primitive):

The storage must be full p2p. Like Freenet, but probably optimized so that people would only store what they themselves need, and give some space to others in the communities they participate in. Not to all the network, like Freenet, but only to whom they want.

The identities should be “federated”, as in communities allowing moderation. Moderation should be done via signed “delete” records, and users would then not replicate “deleted” information.

This way even when “an instance goes down” (say, instance admin has lost their private key or something like that), its stuff will still be replicated.

One can even make “an instance” inherit another instance (again, instance admin has lost their private key or, say, someone has stolen it), so that its users would replicate that.

One can imagine many mechanisms on top of that. But what’s described would allow libraries and allows a thing similar to DNS (again, like a community, to which you subscribe for naming service that associates names with entities) and a thing similar to a static website, and something like Usenet with user identities, moderation and communities.

Dynamic websites are possible too - but I’m not really knowledgeable about smart contracts and such required for it.

I’m actually describing something in the middle of a few things far smarter people are already doing.

This would allow agility between social and technical solutions.

TIL - there is something called Gopher and Gemini. Looks interesting, will read more on it.

we’re a smaller part

Quality trumps quantity anytime.

Still is 😉

I agree to an extent, but the problem is not so much the normies themselves as it is the massive commercial market they represent. You might point to mainstream social media as evidence of a problem with the people themselves, but you would be overlooking the fact that the surveillance and attention economies have meant these social media platforms are deliberately designed to position people against one another to drive engagement so these companies can charge more to advertisers. Discourse on the internet isn’t getting worse because there are more bad people online, it’s getting worse because companies have a financial incentive to turn us into bad people when we are online.

The normies are not the problem, they are the victims. The abusers are the giant corporation manipulating the masses and monetizing a publicly funded infrastructure for their own gains.

We’re in Eternal September now. Have been for a few decades.

Return the internet to the pre-“smart” phone era, in which a minimum bar of effort and knowledge needed to be present in order to connect and participate on the web.

Yeah. I think that’s happening now. The public will discover the Fediverse, but I’m not sure if they’ll be welcomed into every community here.

How about BBSs? If you want to spam at 1200 baud, you had better be dedicated.