So, I was kinda idly thinking about how we’re seeing more and more companies such as Reddit give into peer pressure in favor of profit. As their endless stream of investment dollars with the hope of being profitable eventually seems to be running out. How do you see the web moving forward?
Do you think the best way forward, is to go back? I was thinking about it and back in the old days people would have websites that they would host that would make little to no money, they’d just run them for fun, for the passion of it. Do you see these days returning? Lemmy is kind of an example of that, and other federated self-hosted software. It kind of feels like the way things might be headed. People host their own, smaller scale sites, not in pursuit of profits specifically, but for the passion of it.
I honestly think this way of communicating with eachother is more genuine, more real and honestly more optimal. Communications with others shouldn’t entirely hinge upon the will of one soul entity. And while federation definitely has its issues, I personally think it’s vastly better than being ruled by 1 single entity who’s entire goal is to farm as much mindless doomscrolling as possible in pursuit of profits.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against making money off of your work, I think if you spent time working on something you should absolutely make money off of it. However, I don’t think it’s the way our communication should work. For original content such as art, books, movies, shows, games or other similar mediums, I definitely think that the creator is entitled to make money off of that work.
But having our communication fueled by that sort of business model doesn’t make sense to me. It incentives more harsh restrictions on speech and discussion, restricting user speech/expression to what’s “advertiser friendly” and of course, for harvesting and collecting our personal data like we’re some sort of crop or cattle.
Might’ve gone on a bit of a tangent there, but I hope my general point still got across.
What do you think is the way forward for the internet, and will it require us to go back?
The only reason I ever left classic forums was because they were dying. I resisted coming to Reddit but the community was just too good to pass up, if I needed a guide for some obscure thing it was there! Many of those old forums got rekt due to social conflicts better left dead and buried, but ultimately some of them are still out there, just very slow. Lemmy feels like it’s building enough of a community to be worth it, and there’s no way it’s going to get bought out (right?) The main limiting factor is going to be finances, I assume there’s going to be donation drives or something. That’s going to feel a little clumsy since every instance is going to need its own funding, and the communities you like might not even be on your “home” instance, but I think it will work itself out.
The time when Reddit banned subs like Jailbait and FatPeopleHate was preceeded with a deluge of articles from waning ad-driven media sites (buzzfeed/gawker, wapo, etc). I predict a similar attack on Lemmy if it gets big enough that it can’t be ignored, and IMO it’s well on track to keep growing. I’m curious to see how that goes.
where the lemmy jb tho 😔
I think there’s multiple reasons behind the recent social media company avalanche, but one of the main ones has been the ability in the past to use market prominence as a source of cheap money to buy out competition. The recent moneychasing after interest rate increases is just the other end of that faustian bargain for the small actors in all of this, but is still far from sufficient to stop the larger ones.
Taking Reddit, they’ve initially ran as an extremely lean company and were able to make their initial $100k in funding from Y Combinator last a whopping 9 years from 2005 to 2014. Next funding round gets them $50M… and the first things they do with it? acquire a chunk of imgur and the entirety of Alien Blue, then get a scapegoat CEO to make unpopular changes. They would then later use another funding round to buy and snuff out Dubsmash.
During that time, Twitter was much worse and did the same with Tweetie, Tweetdeck, Bagcheck, Summify, Posterous, Vine, SnappyTV, Twitpic(in a particularly hostile fashion), Periscope, Highly, Squad, Breaker, Revue, Sphere and Threader.
IMO larger actors will feel some crunch, but they can achieve enough revenue to survive the meltdown and the only hope of stopping them is a large scale government-mandated breakup that is unlikely to happen because the largest ones are now starting attempts at buying out governments with the intention of making competition too difficult or even outright illegal.
This already happened with other fields, such as software copyright. DMCA Section 1201 makes another IBM PC-compatible watershed moment impossible and trusted computing is being used to stifle other competition avenues. Patents have completely locked out 5G communications. Electronic circuits have a significant regulatory overhead cost with EMC testing mandates. The most recent attempt in this trend is in AI regulatory capture.
So far the main holdout left is the EU. Buying out representatives there has mostly failed so far, but led to a pivot where attempts are being made to break it apart by influencing voters (see Cambridge Analytica and Brexit) and promoting puppet candidates. If the EU fails at defending itself from this, there isn’t much that can be done as technology has evolved to the point civil wars no longer have a chance to be successful without major involvement from other states.
Small-scale independent hosting is probably the best way around feeding such actors on the internet, but is being prepared against by slowing down IPv6 adoption to use CGNAT as an excuse to limit self-hosting, with law proposals undermining encryption and reducing privacy from governments being made as a backup plan. This will require some reduction in capabilities as bandwidth and storage remain expensive for individuals, but i don’t think this reduction will remain forever since these limitations also included compute in the past.
I’ve always found more valuable discussion to occur on places like the Fediverse. I really miss when old forums were index-able and not this bot/Indian written SEO trash hellscape that’s getting promoted by search engines that ask the question that’s titled in the article 20 times “What is $thing?”
I really hope the internet of old does make a comeback but I’m not optimistic about that. I don’t know what it is with people who cannot grasp such concepts like signing up for a server on a Fediverse, but it’s really annoying. They all sound like they’re written by facebook moms or some crap. You don’t even need to grasp the concept just go on the server you want that’s in the instance lists and sign up! We’ve abstracted away concepts like servers and TCP/IP in general and its taken its toll on people’s tech literacy.
They’re having to create college classes for zoomers because they can’t grasp a file manager because the likes of Google and Apple abstracted all of that away with smartphones. iOS doesn’t even have a filesystem you can browse. It’s all completely sandboxed.
Discord got popular because of all this abstraction they did because apparently plugging in an IP address/port number in a VOIP client like Mumble is way too hard. The interconnected communities concept further strengthened their network effect. I’ve had former friends who can’t even grasp that now because Discord made bad man IP addresses/domains go away. I really hope Discord is next to feel the pinch with the free money faucet turned off.
I hope interest rates continue to climb because these zombie-like companies being kept afloat by 0% interest rates need to be stabbed in the heart so that they can’t continue buying out innovative tech companies or strangle them in the crib just because they might gasp have to compete. FAANG is a bloated corpse that needs to meet its end.
From what I’ve seen on reddit the biggest hurdle to signing up to lemmy at least seems to be endless handwringing about picking a suboptimal choice instead of just picking one
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
- Someone I don’t know
I too was worried of picking the instance, but I decided to make multiple accounts instead. It’s not like the registration requires email, and I can just nuke the account if I don’t need it anymore.
My advice is to either pick the first one you see, make accounts on 20, or host your own. I’d consider the latter if I had the money for server bills
I really hope Discord is next to feel the pinch with the free money faucet turned off.
Not sure if it’s just me but the amount of retarded useless feature Discord has been pumping out in the last few years reminded me exactly of Reddit. Super reaction reeks “low handing fruit” vibe.
Yeah, they are definitely feeling the pressure.
Good. I’m sick and fucking tired of getting a retarded dumbasss zoomer meme when I search a project’s Discord when it doesn’t find anything “HAHA LE EMPATHY BANANA.” Which more and more projects are using that in place of forums because, why the fuck not. Let’s use a shitass platform with a shitass search feature which can be removed by the admins at the drop of a hat because, “Hurr TOS said we can do what we want, you agreed to it neener neener!” The users there are of low quality too. They constantly talk in zoomer speak “Bruh bruh bruh!” See picture below to see what I’m talking about:
It’s like if zoomers and stackoverflow had a baby. Discord makes me genuinely mad at the internet and I’ll cheer for its collapse if/when it happens.
Tell me about it. Don’t you love searching your problem in a Discord server, finding someone asked about it then having to read through a hundred banter and meme only to find out no one answered the answer and you just wasted minutes of your life shoving shits in digital form into your brain.
What’s more infuriating is Discord is a closed garden by design. The chat logs are not indexed by any search engine. You can only access the information if you join the server and if the server is gone for any reason, it brings all the information with it. Yeah, good luck hosting your “community” on that crap.
DISCORD IS NOT A WIKI PAGE
DISCORD WILL NEVER BE A WIKI PAGE
STOP HIDING CRUCIAL INFO ABOUT ANYTHING BEHIND A DISCORD “SERVER”
IM FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF HAVING TO TRUDGE THROUGH DISCORD SERVERS TO FIND ANYTHING ABOT VIDEO GAMES
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Lately I’ve found myself going back to narrower-focus forum sites more. From my perspective, the problem with these big sites is that they’re owned by people who treat them like an investment. Odds are they’ve never laid eyes on a piece of code or read user feedback. But they’re the one’s calling the shots, with the intention of making money. So you have these sites running tests and making changes to maximize profits in the short-term. But when the other shoe drops, it’s the workers getting the axe to protect 0.01% of some investor’s fortune. The way these internet companies grow is basically like how Standard Oil formed a monopoly, then turned around screwed everyone over.
Anyway, rant over. That’s an oversimplification and I’m not an economics person. As for the for-profit internet, I like the idea of user-owned or employee-owned businesses. They have a vested interest in making the site actually good long term. I don’t mind giving my money to people who actually work. None of this VC or equity firm bs.
Federated stuff is cool. I hope it catches on. I’m not holding my breath.
Your post hit me right in the feels.
The internet is becoming a dystopian place. That why I love smaller communities like this. I’ve been a Reddit user but honestly I though almost all the big subreddits were crap. They were either censored to the point you couldn’t say anything that remotely hurts a snowflake or be banned/downvoted to hell or just filled with ads pretending to be articles. It was purely the small subreddits that interested me, and sadly even with those becoming more popular I started losing interest.
Lemmy might never become as big as Reddit but to me that is fine. I’ve always been a fan of seperate forums with small but passionate communities. For example I was on a tech forum where there was this one guy that was always super direct and pretty rude. But guess what, everyone respected him and his opinion because he knew a lot of stuff and actually made very insightful posts. Now try that on Reddit and prepare to be downvoted into oblivion. Reddit has been turning into trash long before the API changes and honestly a big part of it was the community, it’s becoming more vile and toxic every day and if your opinion is just slightly different than the masses you just get labeled as troll or unwanted poster. I really hope Reddit goes under but realistically I don’t think that will happen. Honestly the CEO and top layer might be bad but so are a big part of reddits user’s, most of them don’t give a shit about free speech and just want to see their popular opinion parroted. If you come to Reddit for a good discussion just stop looking because you won’t find any, it’s just “Person A is right and gets upvotes”, Person B is wrong and gets downvoted " no matter how respectful either person is.
I just hope that Lemmy gets big enough to support a decent sized active community. It doesn’t need to be “Reddit big” for me.
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The idea of user/employee owned internet businesses is a cool one and I could definitely see advantages to that! Never really thought of that model, but it’s definitely not a bad idea in concept, Idk how it’d work in practice. Not saying it wouldn’t work, simply that I’m not smart enough to know off the top of my head.
I definitely hope more people start hosting federated social media, I’m not sure I want it to catch on to becoming mainstream. I could see some disadvantages with that that might potentially put us back to square one. Though, that’s just a worry on my part, not really based on anything concrete.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my question, very much appreciated.
You should read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, as the idea of employee-owned businesses where you have to invest in order to work there is a thing that exists in the third book (and foreshadowed by the coops in the second).
I’m not much of a reader, but I might check it out, see if maybe there’s an audio book or something. It definitely sounds like an interesting concept!
lol an audiobook version would probably last a month per book. They are thick even with small print.
Lol, definitely doesn’t sound like my sort of thing then, I can’t get invested in books very easily at all.
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Yeah, you should.
I don’t really know what the way forward is, but I don’t like just having a bunch of big sites everyone congregates on. It’s too metaphorically noisy and I end up not able to find anything I enjoy.
So I hope the future involves federated platforms having enough of a userbase to entertain me without becoming full of everyone. Lemmy’ll need some time to build up the fun userbase, but it’ll get there eventually. maybe faster if sjw would make an instance.
I use wiby and browse gamefaqs a lot, so most of my experience is pretty retro.
I’m totally for a mix of smolweb and distributed services for the future. Being able to throw up my own stuff in a lightweight way, and be “mobile” in the sense I can take my data from place to place instead of it being stuck on Big Tech services is the best for keeping my own sovereignty online, and it’s far closer to the original philosophical ideals of the public internet. I just wish it was easier to maintain a single unique identity that could be shared everywhere, instead of siloed (e.g. different accounts on different fedi instances).
I definitely can see the use of having a single ID that could be shared everywhere, alts are kind of just a thing on fedi, and I can certainly see how it’s not for everyone, I’m one of those people. I have basically 1 main on a few fediverse projects and don’t really deviate from those. I know some people who feels like they have an alt on every instance under the sun, seems exhausting to keep up with. But, if you’re not hosting, your instance, then you kind of have to put a lot of trust that the one who is hosting your instance will remain doing so. Which is a lot of trust to put on someone who isn’t you. I can see how alts can then become almost a requirement in some cases, otherwise if your main instance shuts down, what do you do?
Certainly some things that need to be thought about. I think the fediverse is definitely better than the big tech centralized services, but I definitely don’t think it’s perfect. I wonder what the best solution is/will be. Definitely something fun to think about.
With regard to alts, I think there would (and should!) be room for them where a user desires. There’s a lot of things I’m interested in and am open about with my online persona, but wouldn’t want associated with my work persona. Likewise, I know there are many people out there where keeping a separation between different personas isn’t just a matter of preference, but potentially one of life and death.
As I see it, I’d like to be able to host my own “identity server”, let’s say, which I’d use to identify myself as my public persona to the services I use as that persona, and which would tie all of those services together for me at the identity level. Meanwhile, for things I want to keep separate, I can host additional “identity servers” for other personas, or just create accounts on the different services where I don’t want to have any particular identity tied back to me. I believe that some of the so-called “Web3” stuff has a connection to this, where content is signed and so can all be connected/verified as coming from the same persona, but I never really looked into it as Web3 just feels like a huge (bad) marketing joke to me.
Yes, I didn’t mean phase out alts entirely, I personally would be very upset if I had to use 1 account for everything (huge privacy nightmare). I was thinking about something very similar to what you are proposing here with self-hosted identity servers.
