Mastodon toot:
Daniel Lakeland @dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
Fediverse, the social media system for 40+ year old people who built the world wide web and regret it.
Oct 01, 2026, 11:32 PM
Fuck that. I don’t regret it. We built the world wide web from nothing for everyone and had it fucking stolen by rich assholes who put our community resources WE developed behind ads and paywalls. Unlike those uncreative hacks we have the talent to take it back.
The WWW was built for everyone.
We let rich assholes steal it out of laziness.
Take for example, Facebook vs MySpace or similar. Making a Facebook is instant, making a MySpace took effort. Setting up a subreddit is instant and free and gets you an immediate registered audience, setting up a vBulletin or similar forum is time-consuming and costs money and getting any traffic is an uphill battle. Same thing with posting- on Reddit just mozy on over to that sub and hit post, on a forum you have to register. Or you want to make videos? Gotta pay for a decent web hosting plan, lots of bandwidth, and deal with encoding, playback scripts, etc. Or just make a YouTube and hit ‘upload’.
So we let big platforms take over the Internet. We gained a fuckton of features and convenience. We didn’t consider what we lost- creativity, and the independence of not having to make everything advertiser-friendly.
Monetization is the other frenemy. It’s great that creators can get paid for their work easily. But what we lose with that is every creator pandering to the algorithm, every video begs ‘like comment and subscribe!’, videos shy away from advertiser-unfriendly topics, and the kid filter brainrot is starting to infect common lexicon (‘my brother got caught watching corn and now he’s gonna unalive himself with a pewpew’ type nonsense).
For that reason I think decentralization and federation are the way out.
Look at forums for example- one of the biggest barriers to entry was registration, getting people to care enough to bother registering. Lemmy fixes that, and you can still make a community as closed and private as you want.
I’m hoping a new group of websites will spring up from this. My only fear is they will all drown in a sea of AI slop.
The bit we should regret is that we let the rich corporates steal it.
Yes, bow to me, the grand architect of geocities Dragon Ball Z pages.
We thank you for your service.
It was supposed to make everything better, we were sure of it.
We were horribly wrong. Sorry.
We built it first on PHP and later Node.js. It was clear from the start we had no idea what we were doing.
In our defense, corporations ruined the world wide web. It still has so much potential if they weren’t involved.
It’s been corporate the entire time. The rise of the www literally fueled a global economic bubble.
Corporations are made of people, and people more broadly let them gain power. That doesn’t seem like a defence, it’s just a description of our failure.
Hell yeah, my geocities Nine Inch Nails fan site helped build the Internet
Will you join my webring?
Indeed. You were up above it.
I had a geocities page all about skateboarding. I’d give you the url, but I neither remember it, nor doubt your phone is wide enough for a url that long
Never thought I would say we need to decentralize the Internet
I would like to deny this, but I can’t.
The only thing I wish I could deny is the 40+ part
I can’t understate how much I love this art
I think you mean overstate? Otherwise you’re saying that you don’t really like it at all.
Yeah, overstate. But I will still leave the comment unedited
It’s ok, we overstood you. But yeah, pmjv is a fucking genius.
What did I do this time?!
Me 😉
Don’t you remember?
lel!
As a call center employee, the most inexplicably difficult part of my job is asking an older person to navigate to our website. When I give them the 9 letter address, it almost always results in a google search for them and the ordeal of having them try to pick out our website from the sponsored results brings joy to advertisers everywhere.
This exact mechanism is why so many get caught in scams.
I’m 39, thank you very much.
And 30+ year old people who enjoyed the good times while they lasted and are now nostalgic?
We’re definitely here too
at 31 i barely caught the tail end of Good Internet Days but i sure fuckin miss it
Jip :D
Unfortunately as a younger gen z i need to supplement my Fediversing with traditional social media unless i want to have humor of a previous generation and get obliterated at school. I wish there was a greater variety of people on here
Nah, join the dark side. There will soon be a day when you can’t understand the young ones anyway. Why not today?
Mario teaches typing and the Oregon Trail on 5.2499" disks were just a dream.
Kings Quest 4 on like 8 disks I think?
5.25" you absolute philistine
There, I’ve fixed it.
I would say I like it here, imo the format and overall technology is perfect. I am always impressed by how little battery and data voyager uses compared to all the other bloated apps on my phone.
Having said that, I am disappointed that even without feeds and algorithms, it has become a lot more rage inducing and depressing then I would have hoped for.
There is just so many things that affect my life in a negative way being shown here, can’t a guy get a little ignorant bliss about nerdy topics? Or long, deep discussions comparing the philosophies of niche hobbies?
I agree. After being here for a while, I realized that my feed is always depressing and negative, and the comments and discussions are as well, to the point where I pretty much stopped using Lemmy for a while. But I guess the solution is simply to seek out other communities that are more positive - there should be plenty to choose from :)
I think it is kinda the same ‘echo chamber’ problem that other social media has - I feel my own opinions are being reinforced to the extreme, and while I am glad to be with like-minded people, it is also very exhausting.
Anyway, time to go exploring new communities!
I find the discussions on Lemmy to be better quality than on Reddit, but that can also make them heavier. I can also find Reddit’s banality depressing. I’m still using both atm but I’m in the process of phasing reddit out and I’m fine with that, even if I browse Lemmy a bit differently.
Building a well-rounded community can take time.
I have so many filters just to block depressing news… Also to block strange hive mind posts about beans etc.
That’s one thing you can do here that you (no longer) can on Reddit
I’ll be back within a day, you’d better have your topic of conversation prepared!
Was thinking of making a post about movies which have reception of being worse than the book by the general public that was better than the book in your opinion.
Ok my answer is going to be a little disappointing, but I thought about it for a bit and here’s what I can say…
Usually I read a book or I watch a film, I don’t think I’ve ever done both for the same story. Sometimes there is no equivalent book or film, and when there is, I personally just end up choosing whatever format my gut says to try.
If I’ve imagined a universe and story in my mind (from a book), or had the experience delivered to me (in a film), I don’t want them to conflict so I just choose one. Probably because I see so many debates about this online and I’m just like, “nah I’m not getting involved”.
I’m actually probably the worst qualified person to give an opinion on that!! But I recognize I’m probably a weirdo, as I don’t even watch film trailers or read the synopsis of books before I read/watch them. I just kinda hear about it however that happens, and decide to either skip or jump in. The exception to this being non-fiction or educational stuff, then it matters a bit more.
I guess, I just wanna enjoy (or dislike) a story and leave it at that.
Sorry for the total non-answer. But now you’ve got me curious, what’s your answer? Maybe I’ll make an exception for Grandwolf319 haha
