For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—
Couldn’t have said it better myself
I’m the type to beat my head against a wall until the wall breaks. Then through that hole, I lead my friends. Fewer and fewer of my friends follow me through such holes. Last time I did such, I brought all my friends to discord (and now I regret it). It is hard as fuck to convince normies to adopt a new platform. If they’re not already invested, it will take a serious investment for them to give half a shit. I was able to get some people on discord by promising them that I was running a dnd campaign (I was at the time, but it fell apart shortly therefafter), and those people haven’t been on discord since.
How do I convince them that lemmy is the future? I don’t think I can. Fundamentally, lemmy is objectively better than reddit (not for features, but because lemmy won’t ban you for mentioning green mario and other similar administrative bullshits). I wasn’t able to convince them to use reddit back when reddit was good!
Exactly! That’s how people usually argue against the Fediverse. People have literally been indoctrinated into believing the internet is centralised.
Our biggest enemy is actually the bootlicker.
Once that guy flips the regime will have hard time maintaining legitimacy
Americans don’t understand the politics of proper opposition and dissent
Voting for the other guy ain’t it… And it is a lot more than “politics” it is a life style.
Deny the parasite profit and engagement
I got a small dose of this at work. My coworker has a safety incident, almost fucked up her hand. She got made the safety champion the next day, and was concerned about the optics.
My lead told her “don’t worry what they think of you” but brother you are a leader. Public perception is your strongest tool. You absolutely should be worried what we think of you
too true, make it a lifes mission to avoid getting shafted. take pride in once ability, for me: that is repairing electronics, using privacy respecting platforms and having as small a finger print as possible.
I jumped over here a couple weeks ago at the request of another redditor and it’s like a breath of fresh air.
I still check out reddit for a couple subs that just don’t have enough interaction over here “yet”.
I’ve mentioned lemmy a couple times over there and got replies like " it’s just too complicated " etc. and now that I think about it they were most likely bots 🤔
Ima go back to the cesspool and investigate
Literally a breath fresh of air is what I can relate to. I also realized how it’s way way smaller in the size of communities and I appreciate it. My other favorite is no advertisement. I am as well trying to introduce a couple of my friends to move over the Lemmy. It is a little bit of a curve to learn, but it’s not as hard.
Seems like a lot of people will be coming from reddit.
Hopefully some of the niche communities get a little more traffic over here. Most of the subs I visited over there weren’t very toxic and i actually referred to reddit over google for info on a variety of subjects. It’s just hard to support the platform at this point it really went downhill since 14 ~16
Refugee here. Think I’d agree. A subconscious bias / misunderstanding we bought into
I lately have a saying:
“If it’s not FOSS, it’s not worth your time”
I don’t think it’s too complicated, but it is noticeably more complicated than joining traditional social media. People often get immediately freaked out by the whole concept of instances. I know everybody keeps trying to use the email comparison, but that just is not working. People cannot connect the dots between email and something like Instagram.
It would help to change the nomenclature. Joining a Facebook “group” makes sense to anybody. Change insider jargon like “instance” to seeker-friendly verbiage like “village.”
I like that, or something like that. “Server” and “instance” definitely sounds too prickly and technical to a lot of people.
Personally, I prefer an intellectual barrier to entry. It’s one of the things that made the internet of the early days so much better than today.
Everybody who says this assumes they wouldn’t have been barred from entry were they to try and get in now.
I was speaking more to the early days of the internet. You had to be relatively smart, and determined to get on it.
I’ll never forget when the AOLers started showing up.
yeah, they sure ruined newsgroups…
Eternal September
Yup. I’ll admit, I didn’t foresee AI coming along and finding a way to make the quality of discourse even worse
God I feel so bad for people even just trying to learn stuff online now.
10 to 20 years ago we had a lot less content, but when you did find a hit on your search, you could be much more confident it contained meaningful information. Rather than just the official documentation repackaged across 10 different “articles.”
I would argue it is closer to 60 years.