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.
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.
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.
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 system1970s-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.
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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.
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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”).
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For one, “before Google was a thing” comment. It was popular very quickly and was not the first search engine
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.
Discord is the PERFECT example of a wrong turn down the wrong path. All I ask is stop making me use it to find information on your open source projects.
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.
Bringing this full circle. Federated apps feel like the logical next steps. I think this path is the correct one.
I feel you on this one too.
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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.
Anyway that stuff doesn’t matter. What matters is it was pretty clear and mostly agreed that the internet works best when we use open protocols and not hide community generated content behind login screens and apps. We agreed to continue to participate in adding to the global knowledge as long as everyone played nice and allowed the content we put in for free, can be indexed, RSS’d, shared and scraped. This way anyone can find it and benefit from it.
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.
Bringing this full circle. Federated apps feel like the logical next steps. I think this path is the correct one.
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
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.
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.
Good ol AOL chat rooms… need to bring those back too
a/s/l?
/S drop
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.
The internet was taken over by wall street. The fediverse is a revolt against that.
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 would lead to an “eternal September” effect of declining quality.
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.
It can’t last. Right now, lemmy/ActivityPub is in the “early adopter” stage of the tech hype cycle.
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.
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
If basically feels like reinventing Usenet, with maybe some extra modern features
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 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.
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
I’m also noticing a satisfying lack of the /s tag.
I really liked the /s tag. /s
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 how you say the sentence.
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
