• 1 year

      The thing is that many people, myself included assumed most were dead and cannibalised by Reddit and Facebook groups. Turns out those specialised places have been running continuously on their own pace. Yeah, threads can still span hundreds of pages but in the end going through them makes you an expert on things overnight ;)

    • Bring them back! I for one would rather use a forum over a fucking Discord server any day of the week. At least forums are open, searchable and discoverable. Good luck finding the answer to a question you have that some poor sod like you may have also asked in a Discord server months or years ago.

    • Yes, but this time deep web forums that are unsearchable/unindexed so that information is lost forever! (Discord, telegram, matrix)actually that might actually be a return to web 1 forums before search engines were giant and all forum seach engines sucked ass 😂

  • 1 year

    It is for me, but I have my doubts that the majority will avoid the corporate-owned spaces.

    • 1 year

      I think it’s always going to be a sort of long-tail phenomenon, with most people involved in the biggest platforms, but a large number of small platforms that attract a minority of the overall population.

    • Depends on where you live, but in the US I think there will be a sharp divide between two general groups: a minority who put some thought into what they do, and the vast meme-ified masses who accept whatever is laid out for them.

    • They’re getting so shit people will have no choice. They’re already leaving one alienated group at a time

  • 1 year

    I think by now we have figured out the majority of people are garbage and you only want to spend time with a select group. Discord seems to have this figured out.

      • 1 year

        astronaut holding gun meme.jpg

        we’ve always been garbage.

        • I don’t think we have. Some people theorise that the tower of babel really happened. Whether you’re religous or not doesn’t really matter but it shows that during the earliest recorded days humanity wanted to help each other and everyone by building a tower. There are theories as to why god didn’t allow the tower to reach them so then the blame is put on god, not humanity.

          • The theological explanation I’ve been hearing recently for that is that God didn’t want humanity to be a monolithic entity, but rather to have many different flavors and cultures. Supporting evidence is that in Revelation there is reference to all of the nations and tribes on the Earth being represented in heaven. Meaning that those cultures are retained, minus the worst parts of them. It’s actually a great argument for intentional diversity and allowing people groups to maintain their uniqueness rather than assimilate into a global conglomerate.

            • But to play devil’s advocate (pun very much intended) in the gnostic scripture of the nag Hamadi it straight up says whoever parctipated in the tower of babel will go to hell. Why punish people when they thought they were doing good? And the nag hamadi also says whatever happens in the world is god’s will. Meaning every single event in history whether good or bad is because god wanted it that way. So according to the nag hamadi god wanted all the wars, all the climate change, all the confusion, all the rape and murder is because god wanted it. Why aren’t we born with knowledge of every language if god wanted diverse languages? That way people will choose the language they speak rather than it being forced upon them from wherever they’re born. The nag hamadi actually answers every existential question if you read it objectively without any pre existing beliefs in my personal view. We don’t have any free will on earth according to the nag hamadi and this is the only universe that exists.

              • There are a lot of gnostic writings but they don’t hold much value. They were essentially rejected when they were written. You did ask an interesting question though, why we aren’t born with knowledge of every language if God wanted to diverse languages.

                I’ve read theology about this as well, and the answer that I’m hearing at the moment regarding that has to do with the speaking in tongues that was released at Pentecost. On that occasion, there were people from many other regions assembled in Jerusalem and when they began to speak in tongues, people from foreign lands heard their own native tongue spoken clearly. The way it’s described, it seems even the dialects were correct.

                It’s not clear if that was a miracle of being able to speak in a language they didn’t understand, or if it was a miracle of understanding. But it does seem to be a reversal of the confusion that was caused by the multiple languages at the tower of Babel, yet retaining the diversity and also creating unity. The inferred implication is that the same kind of understanding will be available in eternity when all of the brokenness of this world is restored with a new heaven and new Earth.

    • It depends on the discord. I joined a discord where the most narcissistic people were there and they singled me out for whatever reason because I wasn’t just simply going with their thinking. There was another member that thought like me but their own narcissi tendencies made up a conspiracy theory that somehow that was my alt. I didn’t even know the guy irl. It’s a shame as I was interested in the subject matter of the discord but I guess if enough village idiots own a discord, the smart villager is seen as the idiot.

  • Sounds a lot like the past. And, actually, a bit like the current internet. Custom websites, feed syndication, etc. didn’t disappear, they just shrank in the face of behemoth platforms.

  • Check out Neocities, a great community of indie web fans, built in the spirit of the old GeoCities sites.

    Some really great sites there, it really captures that late 90’s to early 2000’s internet vibes.

    • 1 year

      US servers though… better self-host or use another non-US VPS.

    • Definitely depends on the site because I’ve seen some impressive modern looking sites in the past, but a lot of sites I find on there definitely encapsulate that vibe in a great way.

      • 1 year

        The darknets are here, have been here, but are by definition: dark, so unless you’re in one they’re useless to you.

        First rule of darknet membership: don’t talk about the darknet.

      • Unless something’s changed in the last few years, the darknet is too difficult for normies to use.

    • Your worldbuilding is in SciFi classics tier, but it’s missing all of the global South.

      Australia is already more locked out, but its Internet can only exist in function of US.

  • kameecoding@lemmy.worlddeleted by creatorEnglish
    1 year

    I wasn’t too early, but I joined reddit around the Dota 2 beta, so circa 2012, and damn the site became more and more garbage the more people it had, most comments became nothing but karma farming one liners, references or snide shit.

    Communities grew into massive echo chambers, quality of discussions went down the drain.

    • 1 year

      now they’re heading to lemmy to do the same thing

      • kameecoding@lemmy.worlddeleted by creatorEnglish
        1 year

        meh, lemmy is pretty stagnant from what I have seen, plus you can create your own instance and mostly defederate from a lot of stuff.

  • Real issue is how much effort are people willing to put to maintain those communities.

  • …smaller communities

    So like it was before the dawn of Reddit and social media?

    Sign me the fuck up. I miss my dumb little websites with a dodgy layout full of terribly cropped gifs.

  • I firmly believe that connecting people to their IRL friends is an important part of the potential of the Internet, as it is shown by Facebook, for example.

    But I also believe there are people looking to connect with new people and finding a community where they can express themselves wholly. I think the current Internet is weak in this regard, weaker than it has been before, but I think it’s possible to build a place where people can connect.

    • I have a friends Discord I set up a year before Covid, and for about a year only 3 people used it, mainly to play some games together.

      But when Covid hit, it obviously gained some traction. And now it’s THE place I interact with friends since I’ve long ditched the likes of Facebook.

      I keep going back and forth on whether or not to possibly set up a Mastodon server for friends. The hardest part would be convincing people to use it. But it could just be like our little shared space that could still interact with the wider world. It’d be kinda cool to have a Local feed be just people you know in real life.

      • A small friend group is best suited for chat programs (discord et al.) But if you want to expand the group a mastodon server is a good idea

    • Pretty much. I should be able tobmake friends with any human on earth with an internet connection. That this is still hard is something we need to fix