An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…
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Forums, the fediverse, your own website, and perhaps most controversially of all, outside.
Outside was the first place to be enshittified. I crave third-place, but it hasn’t really existed for decades.
I just finished the Behind the Bastards podcast on Vagrancy. the destruction of the third place and destroying the ability to be anywhere for free without being hassled by the law has changed a part of America that was great. The freedom to exist is becoming elusive. The freedom to find common space with like minded people, that’s becoming hard to find too. I hope this place helps.
Here’s my hope as a 40-something who came of age when the internet was just taking off.
I REALLY HOPE this is the push we need to move away from corporate-owned social media. I have high hopes for federated platforms and forums that are much more like what the internet was when it started (but better because now we have mobile devices).
I realize a lot of people see social media as being some evil thing, but we also fail to realize how much good it has done. Marginalized communities have come together online and formed real movements. People living with health conditions have been connected to one another for support and also life-changing resources and care. People who were isolated because of disability found communities.
I would like to see old-fashioned blogs and RSS make a comeback. I’d like to see forums and federated sites like Lemmy take off. I’d like to see social media sites that have been given way too much weight in society collapse. I don’t think government or reputable media outlets should ever be using a corporate for-profit entity as a means for distributing information.
My worry now, as a bunch of us leave Reddit (the “non-social media” social media site that gave us all some internet community without the horribleness of FB/IG, etc), is that now that these companies have cornered their “gateways to the internet,” there is no wrenching them back. Whether we like it or not, the bulk of people are…well, kinda stupid. They like reality TV and don’t fast forward through commercials and they watch big bang theory and never question if companies’ existences are a net positive. They just take them as a given.
Americans in particular seem to be pretty guilty of this, because our lifestyle lends itself to being spoon fed. It’s easier, makes life simpler…it’s just “the way things are done.” So while I’m hoping this is the beginning of us taking the internet back…I just find it hard to grasp onto any hope for big, positive change. I just feel like we’ve been beaten into submission and as the planet burns to a crisp, capitalism is just gripping the reigns tighter than ever because they know this should be about the time that people start to buck. But…we just don’t. I think even they’re surprised.
I REALLY HOPE this is the push we need to move away from corporate-owned social media.
We have actually regressed significantly on that and we could easily go back to before it existed. Before Reddit there was (and still is) a decentralized discussion network called Usenet. It was extremely well designed and has none of the design flaws that Fedverse has. All newsgroups were automatically merged across all instances. Your UI showed you only new comments and submissions, in the newsgroups that you subscribed to. You could mark a comment tree as killed, and then you wouldn’t see any new comments in that particular comment tree even while still subscribed to the newsgroup. You generally had your choice of moderated or unmoderated group for each topic, with tens of thousands of topics.
The only reason people don’t use it anymore is because all the free servers disappeared. But now I see all these new free Fedverse servers, which is great, but how come no new free Usenet servers? They could be ad supported. I started using the internet in 1982 and Fedverse feels like a reinvention of the decentralization wheel, which a bunch of design flaws the original has already solved long ago. If there were free servers again, and perhaps a new mobile client, Usenet use would skyrocket as people personally experience how easy and seamless it is.
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Discord is probably the tool best-suited to capture users’ social needs right now. It’s definitely the best Reddit alternative we have.
Sure, Discord chats are great, particularly for smaller communities/IRL friends. But as an alternative to subreddits or classic forums they’re absolute rubbish. Lemmy seems to be the only real game in that town for now.
Discord is probably the tool best-suited to capture users’ social needs right now. It’s definitely the best Reddit alternative we have.
Sure, Discord chats are great, particularly for smaller communities/IRL friends. But as an alternative to subreddits or classic forums they’re absolute rubbish. Lemmy seems to be the only real game in that town for now.
Every time I see “to learn more, come hang with us in our Discord,” I die a little. Discord is a chat application. It isn’t meant to be a repository of knowledge for your app/service. That’s what your website is for. And it’s not a substitute for a proper knowledgebase or documentation either.
I had a fight over this. For me, it was natural to have a distinction between chat, an instant, forgetful and private messaging platform, and websites, a more permanent and open repository.
Some disagreed hard and insisted discord was working just fine for them. Am I becoming the dinosaur?
For people who use discord a lot (and to be totally honest, I’m one of them, I even ended up changing the liftoff theme colour to the old discord logo colour by instinct) it feels like it’s just as easy to use. But you’re right, it’s not a replacement, and it can be hard to keep up with no easy way to scroll through feeds or anything similar, no matter how much discord tries to implement them. It will forever be, at its core, a messaging app.
So I think it boils down to how used to using discord you are. If you’re going to discord to replace reddit, you are bound to be extremely disappointed by the results. It’s not designed to do that. And a lot of people aren’t realizing this.
As I saw it, Discord is a replacement for IRC (for text) + Mumble (for voice), and they succeeded despite problems all proprietary platforms share. Now, I can understand subreddits (or communities now) having a chatroom like Discord for contingencies, but replacing forums?
And discord is slowly moving towards a similar level of corporate takeover and shifting it to “keep up” with every competitor app they can imagine. So I don’t even know how long that one will last.
I’m not so sure this is a decline of social as much as decline in the control of large corporate interests. Lemmy is getting going well from what I can see. There will be issues but Reddit did as it grew and Twitter made the fail whale meme for their issues. The internet was pretty awesome in the 90s when none of these large companies even existed.
I mean I am excited for the potential the fediverse has, but I do wonder how long until it becomes enshitified too. Every great new invention that serves the needs of the people always goes downhill at some point. Remember that television networks used to be an amazing platform for all our needs.
The nice thing is that if things do become shit on one instance, the rest just disconnect. The lack of total control over the system by one entity ensures that there is no complete capture to enable the enshitification from taking root and destroying what is good about it.
I am hopeful, but I am cautiously sceptical. I remember hearing about cryptocurrency taking off in 2011 and all about how it was decentralized and was immune to corruption etc and then a decade later seeing SBF types in the news.
The difference here is that there is no supposed or even desired value from the people participating here. We’re not all trying to get rich off of this, nor are we trying to replace all forms of communication here like many crypto purists wish would happen with Bitcoin replacing the dollar. Nothing rides on this being a success, perpetual growth isn’t necessary, and defederation doesn’t mean that our communities wouldn’t still have worth to us.
You don’t seem to really understand the word enshitification. It’s not just “things getting shittier” - it refers specifically to the capitalist pressures that are exerted on private platforms and services that need to chase investor capital to scale and survive. The reason enshitification happens is because they are operating under a model that needs to first entice users with a high value product that is subsidized by venture capital, but that when that dries up the pressures come first to appease the investors at the expense of the users and then the owners at the expense of the investors. Fediverse for all its croaks and groans in these early stages is specifically designed to be decentralized and scalable by small clusters of users. It’s user owned and managed. When one cluster shows signs of degrading, you can move to another. I’m bullish on fediverse and decentralized platforms like this on being that solution and it’s not clear yet that they suffer the same inevitable enshitification that legacy platforms do.
I am hopeful that a sizable chunk of people are smart enough to see the writing on the wall with corporate owned media and will inevitably follow to the non-corporate-controlled places (like the fediverse model). The danger will be the model falling over as the temptation to centralise, control, and exploit becomes higher. The lemmy model only works if there isn’t a dominate server with a large proportion of content right? What happens if lemmy.world gets big then just decides to de-federate? It’s just reddit all over again.
The big social media platforms made it easy to join and easy enough for your parents and friends to use even if they weren’t techies. The Fediverse isn’t hard to join, in the sense you can easily create an account some place, but it tends to be narrowly focused. Trying to explain to grandma that she needs to join a Mastodon instance for sewing but a different instance for knitting is going to be difficult when she can stay on Facebook and have both in one place. Something like Lemmy does help in these cases in the sense that there are multiple communities available to you from a single account. But that “everyone I know is here” feeling seems like it’s going to be a thing of the past.
she needs to join a Mastodon instance for sewing but a different instance for knitting
Am I missing something? I thought Mastodon worked just like lemmy where you can subscribe cross-instance
You can subscribe to an account on another instance, but you can’t get all of the posts on another instance without having an account on that instance.
