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
Im sorry but I did not contribute to this in any meaningful way.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Yes, bow to me, the grand architect of geocities Dragon Ball Z pages.
bows deeply
You checked out Neocities yet? I’ve been thinking of signing up.
We thank you for your service.
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.
Software developers are on Mastadon, though. Big time.
The Fediverse in general attracts a lot of tech people compared to elsewhere, but even then, they’re still a minority.
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
I mean you’re technically right, it is possible in theory. However, do you actually think that will be the case? I personally don’t see it.
The WWW made vast amounts of information remotely accessible and easy to navigate. Likewise, social media made large scale remote and asynchronous social interaction possible. Even though both took decades to evolve into what they are today, they fundamentally transformed how people access information and connect with one another. That’s what makes them revolutionary.
The Fediverse isn’t exactly like that. It’s a neat piece of tech, but it doesn’t exactly solve a problem that couldn’t already be solved. You can already communicate with people remotely, build communities, publish content, and interact with people across different platforms. The main thing that the Fediverse is trying to sell people on is decentralization which comes with perks like extra privacy and control, but which is valuable hence why this place has a genuine userbase, but I don’t see it going beyond that.
As it stands now the Fediverse is just another platform competing in a sea of other platforms. The Fediverse is already around a decade old, and not much has changed during this time. It was niche a decade ago, and it’s still niche now. The spot that it carved in the ecosystem is that of social media alternative that caters to left wing politics and tech bros. Even if it becomes more mainstream, it’ll still be viewed as another form of social media rather than something entirely new and different. The Fediverse is most certainly not like the WWW.
Who are all these people comparing the WWW and social media as a concept to the significance of the fediverse? I’ve never seen it. Lots of people are excited about the concept of a decentralized reddit-like social media, but I’ve never seen anyone express what you described.
Feels like we’re getting annoyed at nothing here honestly.
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…
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.
I personally blame the iPhone. Shit all started going downhill from then
Nope. You got the time period right, but I would like to posit it’s when they started letting our Parents, drunk uncles and dumb ass aunties on Facebook.
The problem always has, and always will be, Facebook.
It’s not Facebook either. The concept of letting too many of “those” people in to quickly and destroying the culture is known as “eternal September” and is from 93-94.
But what made it more accessible and easy to access places like Facebook in the first place? Smart phones.
Smartphones weren’t really all that popular until 2007, and none of the ones before the iPhone 3G or like the Blackberry’s could really run Facebook all that well. The iPhone never really blew up to the level it’s at now until the 4 arguably, which didn’t come out until 2010 or 2011 (think it was 2010). Facebook had already been pretty infected before then.
I completely agree. Should have never taught the geriatric community how to access FB
Honestly someone should have just whooped Zucks ass and shut down Facebook entirely. It’s whole original premise was scummy and if only got worse. There was data at the time showing how bad it was. The roll out to various colleges was happening at the same time as a nationwide student health and wellness survey. Mental health dropped significantly whenever access was opened to a college.
someone should have just shut down Facebook entirely
And nothing of value would be lost.
It really is a lot like religion. All the good stuff you can get somewhere else but much of the bad stuff is unique.
In our defense, corporations ruined the world wide web. It still has so much potential if they weren’t involved.
there’s 2 kinds of people on fedi:
40 year olds who remember the good ol days of the interwebs
16 year old queer shitposters who got tired of getting called every slur imaginable on other networks
both are into linux
LGBT40+
Queer less than 25 here, I came here not because I was getting called slurs but because I’m tired of companies and of AI, I’m also on Linux :3
I’m a Luddite who discovered this shit inadvertently, and still doesn’t actually understand how any of it works
But you’re correct in that I’m pushing 50
I have to use Windows at work now, which is ass.
Anyway, I had a question about how to achieve something in Powershell the other day, so I asked it on Mastodon. Got basically nothing in response.
Every time I ask how to do something in Linux I get swamped with responses.
Make of that what you will.
you forgot the 3rd kind
Russian bots
the 3rd kind is people too toxic for reddit and got banned
also into linux
Luckily it is typically too small to be much of a bot target. I don’t subscribe to world news subs though, dark places.
It’s usually only the news subs. But if you make claims that counter Kremlin propaganda you can sometimes summon them.
Like if I just say Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine, it won’t (why? Beats me). But if I say they are killing ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens as well as Ukrainian men, women, and children, then we have a good chance.
I got others if it doesn’t work.
Edit: (WITNESS ME! Lol) Edit 2: Now I’m impressed. I knew I could do it, I didn’t expect it to work quite so well. I’ll check back in a few hours.
“People disagreeing with me are bots”
If they’re getting paid to do it, they’re just meatbots.
…Do you unironically believe people are getting paid to be on lemmy?
They’ve got an entire instance!
It was supposed to make everything better, we were sure of it.
We were horribly wrong. Sorry.
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
Hell yeah, my geocities Nine Inch Nails fan site helped build the Internet
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
Will you join my webring?
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?
Accurate.
Ditto
