I’m talking about what they say at 8:20:
Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The main difference to today was twofold:
For one there were no algorithms fighting to keep you online at any cost – at some point you were done with the internet for the day, as mind blowing as this may sound.
But more importantly: The old internet was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages gathering around shared beliefs and interests.
These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains. These communities worked because they mirrored real life much more than social media:
Each village had its own culture and set of rules. Maybe one community was into rough humour and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned easily.
If you didn’t play by the village rules, you would be banned – or you could just go and move to another village that suited you better.
So instead of all of us gathering in one place, overwhelming our brains at a townsquare that in the end just leads to us going insane, one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple:
go back to smaller online communities.
That’s partilly more on the people creating duplicates without looking if the community doesn’t exist already.
Granted, the lemmy explorer tool might not be around for too long for people to be easily able to - since someone on you instance needs to known a community exists on other instance and access it for everyone to see it. And some people might just not be aware of it as well.
Which is not bad; actually and to the contrary, it can be a part of each instance’s cultural identity and it’s a practical way of ensuring the diversity and viability of smaller instances.
Discussing c/soccer in an Argentinian lemmy can be very different than discussing it in hexbear, for example. Not to mention it’s likely most of everyone would’t even be able to participate in hexbear’s. Furthermore, general subjects becoming tied to the largest instances, which statistically have more surface to cover the creation of communities for any subject ever, returns us to the same problem of conversation and community becoming centralized into a “Reddit” instance.
A good perspective I didn’t have.
Are you talking about https://lemmyverse.net/ ? Why should it disappear?
What I meant is I have no idea how long it exists, so people might not have the luxury of using it to check for existing communities.
Didn’t mean to start a panic with bad wording :)
I see. Hopefully it will stay around, or an equivalent will emerge :)
I do too! Its incredibly handy