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
People on here think too highly of themselves and the Fediverse. The overwhelming majority of people here don’t know the basics of programming and of the few that do, the vast majority of them don’t make any contributions. Even to those who do contribute, comparing themselves or the Fediverse WWW and the people who built it rather arrogant, no?
At the end of the day, the Fediverse would be better off going through a reality check. It’s a niche alternative to mainstream social media that trades content for privacy. The tech is neat and the idea behind it is noble, but that’s about it. It’s not going to revolutionize the internet any time soon.
The internet itself was once a niche alternative to mainstream knowledge
The way I see it is, that we are all good or even experts at something. The internet is not only about programming alone. The frustration comes from people who 30 years ago spent time discussing and sharing all kinds of knowledge on websites, forums or wikis but now, large corporations charge money to present the same knowledge more conveniently, but not always in the right context
This includes programming, but also gardening, how to ferment cabbage, how to clean a smoking pipe, what to feed guinea pigs.
It is definitely doable, but will take many decades
Never thought I would say we need to decentralize the Internet
Yeah… That shit with ICANN and Autistici kinda raises some red flags now though…
Yes, bow to me, the grand architect of geocities Dragon Ball Z pages.
bows deeply
We thank you for your service.
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.
/fistclench
We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good,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.
for 40+ people who built the WWW then sold it to the enshitifiers, which they now regret
It was not sold. It was taken/stolen
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.
But alas, now they are down in 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
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!
Lawyer: You can’t divorce your wife, just because she’s a bit odd.
Micky: I said, she’s fucking Goofy!
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.
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.
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
I’m 39, thank you very much.
