Ask Lemmy

All technology becomes degraded over time. Enshittification is real.

I agree the internet feels a lot different than the eqrly 2000s, but breaking down what's different I can't pin anything concrete down.

There's pretty much no fundamental differences between how social media was and how it is now. People talk, share interests, get in arguments. What we feel is nostalgia for a wild west internet with less people and rules that will never exist again.

More people use the internet now so more people participate in the conversation. That's how it will be for the rest of human history probably.

Social media is just a symptom of the larger problem which is the corporations prefering to build walled gardens so they can control users rather than the open protocols that defined the early internet. Back in the day, I used to call it "everything becoming facebook".

Social media is fundamentally a moat - a wall built around a set of consumers to keep them away from competitors. Investors love moats. If you whisper as quietly as you possibly can to yourself "I found a company with a wide moat that no one is talking about yet" JP Morgan himself will literally burst through your wall like the Kool Aid Man. They love it because it avoids competition, and as much as competition is the whole point of capitalism, it's the last thing an actual capitalist wants to deal with.

A big part of what made the early internet super valuable was the opposite of moats: open protocols. For example how GMail can send email to Yahoo or any other email provider. If Google had their way, that's not how email would work at all - you'd need a google account to both send and receive emails. That's why these companies have been trying to kill email for ages, trying to get people to use their own proprietary messaging systems instead, where you can only send to others with an account. Then they could capture you and keep you all to themselves.

Which brings us to the fediverse. The fediverse is an attempt to return to open protocols rather than creating a moat around a group of users. In many ways it's like email - your email provider might cut off a server if it's just sending spam all day, and this is basically defederation. But otherwise nothing stops you from communicating with anyone, and that's how it should be.

Everything's too like, corporate nowadays on mainstream internet. Like less about being social with others and more trying to sell a product or a brand or something. Those big tech names have optimized everything to extract as much profit as possible from you and your time with ever decreasing benefit to you.

Yeah. Yeah it's just you my dude. There's no way I've ever heard that sentiment before on websites or other posts.

I guarentee you're not the only one

There are still smaller communities out there. It can be discussed that Lemmy is a small community itself.

Some of my best memories online are in golden era Tumblr, which was a pretty big social media. So I don't think social media, per se, is the issue.

The feeling you're talking about pretty much always happens when you find a small community. Like when you move to a small town and life just somehow feels more personal. Those are still around, they just aren't well known (but they never really were). I mean it's like there are a lot of very large cities today but small towns are still there too.

More so, Internet has destroyed the spirit of conversation. When I was younger, people found me charming and intelligent when first meeting me after talking for a bit. Now, they can quickly "google" what I say and quickly learn that I am an ass, bullshitting and exaggerating what I don't know, but making it up to keep the conversation interesting.

YUP! This is exactly why I'm so passionate about it. Awfulness still happens, but it feels organic like the original days of the web.

"Social media" is a really vague term. I think there are broadly 3 categories:

• Web2.0 social media: facebook, twitter, discord, reddit

• Forums: Old school web fora, (mastodon & lemmy?)

• Debateable social media: IRC, email chains/threads

Only the first category is relatively new and has captured the attention of the general public outside of nerds. The other two are either decentralised or are niche centralised sites. IMO it seems like the web 2.0 stuff is most problematic but not sure if it's the hyper-centralisation or their general popularity that is the issue.