I’ve been exploring the fediverse and subbing and posting all over the damn place. Realizing lemmy can federate with kbin blew my mind. Not to mention the possibility of turning my old laptop into a personal server to host my own instance. Is this what it felt like to discover how the internet worked in the 90s?
You are experiencing the joy of breaking away from corporate silo internet dominated by shills, trolls and paid posts.
Meh. According to the front page, @Communism is trending. Yet there are no posts and 2 subscribers.
I suppose that is one type of trend.It’s basically a simple cache right now. Newest = “trending”. The feed trending algorithm can be improved in many ways.
It can be capitally improved by feeding you ads and astroturfed content too. But then ir’d just be Reddit or every other social.
I think new communities are extremely heavy weighted in the trending section. I’ve not looked at the algorithm for it, but the 2 communities I made were on there immediately after creating them.
What do you mean, that’s overactive for a Lemmy community /s
This is exactly what it felt like. It is amazing to see how well federation works - look at all the usernames from different instances! I enjoy the Cambrian explosion of new communities. It feels like conquering and taming a wild frontier.
Cambrian explosion. Love that take!
Just recently created a Mastodon account, and this is my first Lemmy post, so it’s very new to me too, and there is definitely a feeling of discovering something new.
I do have a similar feeling with the Fediverse as I did as a teenager back in the web 1.0 days, although it might just be that there is a lot of text content that feels sincere (which honestly there is on Reddit too), much less spam and advertising, and generally just has not been commercialised at all yet.
@MrFlamey Using your Mastodon account, you could even follow a lemmy community; and fav, boost and comment on their posts (like I did just with your comment). Just copy the URL to anything on the fediverse, paste it into the search box of your Mastodon client: you’re good to go!
Longer explanation: https://toot.kif.rocks/@anathem/110565430770229960
Thanks. Seems to let me follow them, but I can’t see the posts in mastodon, only by following the link through to the lemmy community. I guess I should try commenting from Mastodon or something. It’s fine though, I will get used to it eventually :)
@MrFlamey Give it some time. If you follow a lemmy community, all posts of that community will _from now on_ reach your Mastodon instance and be displayed there. There is no retroactive synchronization.
(The exception to this is when someone from your Mastodon instance already followed that community in the past: Then somebody else already did make those posts available to your instance and you can immediately see some posting history of that community.)
Maaaan. The internet used to be a wacky place with all kind of over the top interface concepts. Now it’s all clean text and minimalist design. Far more functional but not nearly as fun or creative.
I feel conflicted about it because its definitely more accessible, especially to those with disabilities like epilepsy now.
Modernism is in right now, I guess. Give it a decade and we’ll be busy rebelling against the tyranny of Helvetica again.
Laziness too, ain’t nobody got time to painstakingly hand-place and align each glittery Blingee graphic on a page while also making sure it’s responsive and user-friendly on all viewports. Just throw in the default TailwindCSS styles and forget about it.
You should visir neocities, it is filled with all sorts of weird and fun websites.
To a small extent, yes. I kindof felt that when I discovered mastodon 5 years back, but it’s still not quite the same. Back then, the internet was a new adventure. Every website was kindof shitty, but they all had their own unique personalities based on who made them. The internet’s potential was unknown. The fediverse just feels like more of the same bland social media, but everything is messier and hard to find.
I say that, but Lemmy just makes me realize how much I took reddit for granted. Forums are nice, but it was great to have a place where at least 1/5th of the english speaking population congregated to discuss the issues of our time. I don’t think we will get that on the fediverse.
I want to believe in the fediverse, but it REALLY needs to be ironed out and made easier to use.
I miss the days before search engine optimization.
Used to be able to find amazing stuff. Now, searches only get you the top paid for content.
I remember in high school I found this guy’s blog that detailed how he built this amazing looking house off grid by himself (besides pouring the foundation). I dreamt of one day doing the same thing, following the plans he provided.
In college, years later, I met my fiance. Late night I shared this dream with her and she was encouraging. I went to try to find that blog, thinking I need to save that info for my future self. I couldn’t find it. I searched for weeks trying to find it, but never did.
I know there are resources on building your own place, but I absolutely loved his design. It had high ceilings, wrap around porch. Used geothermal heating, solar panels… Still makes me sad to think about.
Web rings rise up.
100% agree. I work in web and I hate the trend of SEO-bait articles. They’re largely totally unhelpful, too! I bet you could still find that blog, though, with enough time – if you remember anything about it, that is!
SEO-bait is the result of search engines and the prioritization of long form text over relevant hits. The internet has existed before search engines, and will exist long after they’re replaced with something else.
not a 90s kid but it feels similar to the early 2000s internet to me
Early 2000s Internet is like 90s Internet but with more bandwith and CSS.
It’s more before and after having a GUI web, which wasn’t so much a matter of Andreessen inventing it (which happened in like 1994/1995) as it was ISP’s switching over from shell accounts for their users so most people could use it (which was more 1997 - 1999 or so.)
Before that most of the social internet was usenet and IRC. Usenet in particular reminded me a lot of what reddit was for a while (especially reddit old) and what I could see the fediverse turning into.
Yes, sort of! When I was a little kid, before our family had access to the internet, I was dialing into BBS (Bulletin Board System) servers that random people self-hosted around the world. Some were sort of secret and grew from word of mouth. Many of them were small communities, not too different from a lemmy instance, except it was all text-based. There was something so addicting and novel to suddenly be able to chat and contact random people all over the world.
Then when we did get the internet I would stay up finding all kinds of random homemade websites and web communities. I learned to code and built my own websites. verything was much more decentralized back then and it really did make the internet more interesting and full of unknown gems. People would put each other’s website links on their websites, which formed endless paths to discover new places. For a while, the internet really was just random individuals with very little corporate/commercial content.
I once racked up a ~€500 phone bill by dialing into US-based BBS’es. My parents were furious.
It’s more akin to the early 2000s to me. Not in the sense of how the tech works but more in the feeling of nothing being “owned” by any one person or entity and things just being…free.
In the 90s it always felt exciting to go online and see what interesting things you could find. There was no AI driven dopamine feed to keep you doom-scrolling passively for hours - you had to actually go looking for stuff. You’d stumble an interesting website, then follow links from there to other things. Finding a cool website felt like an accomplishment. It really felt like something special.
The internet has now turned into half a dozen walled gardens blindly trying to “maximize engagement” at all costs. They’re all competing to just retain eyeballs as long as possible with low effort content shoved down your throat.
The rest is a bunch of blogspam fighting for the top page of Google. There’s no use even bothering to search for things anymore, because no matter what you search for it’ll be a bunch of low effort “Top ten” lists, probably written by AI, containing just enough superficial bullshit optimized for SEO to make it to the front page of Google.
Wikipedia is probably one of the few places you can still experience what the 90s internet was like. You can spend hours going down a rabbit hole, but it doesn’t push anything on you. It’s just there, waiting to be discovered, if you want it.
When i first heard about the fediverse, my immediate reaction was “What a novel idea, but that won’t work” before taking a moment to remember that’s just how everything used to work. The Fediverse is just Usenet.
I’ve just become so brainwashed by the dystopian hellhole of the 2020’s Internet that I forgot what it was, and what it could become again.
This is the thing that excites me the most about the fediverse. If we can keep it from being monopolized by corporations, it will become a reflection of what the old internet used to be.
I think one of the key things that will prevent the capture of the Fediverse by corporations is never ever allowing whitelists for instance defederation and blocking to happen.
If that ever does happen, it becomes trivially easy to break the decentralized network up into a few centralized silos that are all disconnected from the rest of the network completely, whereas, the way it stands now, you have to explicitly block anyone you don’t want to be connected to, so it’s a great way to deal with bad actors and nasty instances, but makes it extremely hard to wall off your instance completely, because if you block another instance it’s trivially easy for the people that are unhappy with that to find or create a small new instance that flies under the radar and allows them to see the content on both the instance they left and the incense it blocked. It also makes it incredibly hard to capture people on your instance because they can always create a small instance and use that instance to see the content on the instance they left.
I think also limiting block list size for instances (but not users!) Could be a really good way of doing this too because then any instance I want to block a ton of other instances is going to have to fork lemmy to lift that band and then everyone will know they did that and know to get off it.
I agree, but take a small look at email. Email is the way it is currently (basically 3 providers, if you aren’t on their specific “good people” list then your emails get nowhere, residential IPs are considered bad by default, a single configuration miss dooms your server forever) because it was hard to maintain an email server, and even harder to combat spam. The fediverse is not immune to spam, but it does have the advantage that there is no expectation of privacy, and thus it is possible to have moderators filter spam. But that’s a hard ask. Email became that way because only large corporations were able to write good filters.
I won’t argue that there is a possibility that things could go wrong for federated and a decentralized social networks like Lemmy and Mastodon, and we are going to have to fight a cultural and technological battle against that, but I think at least this is a very good start, and I don’t think it inherently has to go that way either.
+1 on Wikipedia, I still love browsing it. The amount of interesting things you can learn is amazing! The world is a wacky place.
Let’s not forget reddit was also like this for a very long time, that’s why many loved it.
I also have good feelings for the fediverse, really hope this will turn everything around and last.
I feel like the fediverse is similar to email servers. No one company controls email. Each email provider can set up their own rules, etc.
@Puffymumpkins
You can also comment from self-hosted mastodon :D this is awesomeor selfhost lemmy (this comment is for test)
@Puffymumpkins That’s about how I remember it. Having your own webpage, running servers from your PC, dabbling in all kinds of new communication methods.
Heck, friend of mine ran an email and shell account ISP from his bedroom for a number of years.
I think this is the thing that made me stay on Lemmy and don’t look back on Reddit. I’d imagine that the federation is not a totally new concept, but since i discovered it i’m feeling just like when i discovered the internet when i was 5 years old, i posted more here in the last 5 days than what i used to post on reddit in a year.
Could you talk more about how your experience with Lemmy has brought back those feelings? I remember the sense of wonder I felt when browsing the web in the early '00s, when every personal website, PHP board and IRC community was unique and discovering a new website/community was really exciting. I still feel this sense of wonder when I visit content-rich websites from that era, such as amasci.com, https://atlas.limsi.fr/ and https://sciencemadness.org/talk/.
What I’ve seen from Lemmy brings me back to the early years of Reddit, but I’m yet to find anything that really brings back the way I felt when I started browsing the web. But maybe I just haven’t explored enough?
The whole fediverse thing is what really takes me back to my first days on the internet, because after some years, the way the internet works in general became common knowledge, so nothing felt new, or the things that were really new, were actually just stupid concepts (Take for example NFTs that rised in popularity last year, people said it would change the future and the way the internet works, but it actually was just a dumb pyramid scheme and it led to nothing, even to this day i have no idea how it works.)
But the federation is a genuinely interesting system that is different from everything i’ve seen in the past years. The concept of anyone hosting conglomerates of communities in their own house or even in a dedicated server, while all those instances communicate with eachother is mind boggling for me, and the fact that none of this is owned by a company truly reinforces the feeling of community. The fediverse feels like a part of the internet that is yet to be explored, and while i don’t understand it completely, there’s still much to learn and discover. Browsing through Lemmy doesn’t feel just like a daily dopamine rush activity just like Reddit, it genuinely feels like i’m interacting, contributing and being part of it, something i haven’t felt for a long time tbh.
The feeling of ownership, of oh I can go host an instance at home and knowing that you aren’t at the whim of corporate admins or a company’s poor fortune, is so incredibly cool. I really hope more decentralized/selfhostable alternatives to major services start to take off.
deleted by creator
As far as I can see it existed and still exists though, it’s just that there is less incentive to produce this kind of content and leave it open. I can find pieces of it still remaining, but the environment that favored this kind of content is gone. It’s a natural result of how the system changes as people learn to game it and find ways to gain power or make it profitable. I hope the advent and growth of places such as this one gives it some fresh air, though.
There are modern websites that still bring those feelings to me. For example, this blog has impressed me with its content and creative visualizations: https://ciechanow.ski/ Personal websites and web forums just don’t surface anymore when searching the web or browsing large communities/aggregators, but I can find them on places such as https://curlie.org/ (A modern-day web directory) and https://search.marginalia.nu/ (a search engine that focuses on non-commercial websites).
I think for me Lemmy is providing a portal to those places because the content posted here tends to be more 'high effort digital garden’ type links than low effort attention grabbers.
I dont think lemmy is necessarily doing anything to make this true, its just that its new and the people participating are more likely to be motivated by altruistic reasons, or just everyday human behavioral reasons, than the profit-making or attention-seeking we might see on ‘popular’ sites like reddit.
edit: however maybe the ‘federated’ nature will keep influence spread enough that the big system-gamers won’t try to setup shop? we will see. Either way I like it here for now
Also, to be fair, there’s much less of a system to game in the first place, because you don’t have an overall karma score, so there’s not really any incentive to karma farm.
When the world wide web was fresh? Absolutely, it was.
It felt exactly like this. Instead of checking the same few sites over and over all day, there were so many cool sites that you could buy a monthly magazine with cached webpages on a CD-ROM. I’d actually be cool with that again in 2023, honestly.
deleted by creator
It would be normal for ISP’s to give you some free webspace to build your own site, that’s how perfectly ordinary it was assumed to be for regular people to be having their own self-hosted sites.
