- Use distributed, federated services like Lemmy, mastodon etc.
- Support the hosts with our own funds.
- Moderate our own communities.
The second point is the most important. Reddit happened because they are a corporate entity seeking profit. Let’s own our social media platforms by actively contributing funds to them.
Honestly never liked Twitter so mastodon was like meh. But as dorky as it sounds Reddit was fun, even went to some of the meetups back in the day when it was smaller, etc. I’m now seeing the light on the federated / dWeb scene more clearly now.
Totally agree we need a new grassroots web. The classic internet is way too centralized now and is about to become a pit of GPT-generated nonsense clogging up search engines. Stoked to jump in and support these new communities!
It doesn’t seem like an issue yet, but I’m interested to see how the fediverse combats the inevitable GPT spam it’ll start receiving as it grows and misinformation/advertising becomes more attractive on these platforms. It’s not an easy problem to solve (though handling it better than Elon should be pretty easy lmao).
True any text based thing is vulnerable I suppose. I suppose the SEO/content farming stuff tho is more what I was referring to. It was already happening with scrapers ripping off real content to get ad impressions or rein affiliate links. thats a big part of why Wikipedia and Reddit got some priority (either algo or humans adding “Reddit” to a search).
But hopefully stuff like the fediverse makes it a bit more grassroots in that a shitposting bot has less of a direct financial incentive in the way the web does.
Since you mentioned Twitter and GPT, I’m also not very much of a Twitter guy, but I open it sometimes just because.
Jesus Christ, EVERY POST is filled with lots of people just quoting the GPT bots to “answer” for them some ironic shit. People can’t even be bothered to even interact with a post of their interest anymore.
As someone who never got to experience the web as so many remember it (before it became centralized and primarily monetized), I’m quite excited at the prospect of Lemmy and the Fediverse in general. Maybe my generation and those to come can come to know a better internet.