Mastodon toot:
Daniel Lakeland @[email protected]
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.
Uhhh excuse you, you create the meaningful content!
Says you
It was supposed to make everything better, we were sure of it.
We were horribly wrong. Sorry.
We built it first on PHP and later Node.js. It was clear from the start we had no idea what we were doing.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
I always thought it was like a mosaic of people pretending to be a mosaic of other people. /s
Yeah. A bunch of old out of touch uncs with no personality outside of nostalgia for old internet platforms they got banned from, racism and misogyny.
With inflated egos about how much they actually mattered (seriously, built the world wide web).
Such a healthy platform that won’t just slowly shrivel up and die.
I mean Facebook, Xitter, Reddit and friends are all but what I’d consider a “healthy platform”, and unfortunately they’re doing great.
Hell, 4chan perfectly fits your description and it’s still around. I think we’ll be fine.
Upvoting bc using 4chan as the standard picture of health on the Internet is simply too perfect!!
Finally someone who at least knows the difference between the WWW and the Internet…
That’s information superhighway thank you very much.
That’s that series of tubes
Hello, it’s me, Al Gore
In our defense, corporations ruined the world wide web. It still has so much potential if they weren’t involved.
Corporations are made of people, and people more broadly let them gain power. That doesn’t seem like a defence, it’s just a description of our failure.
I felt my back in this post.
I feel seent.
Lemmy is under 25 and over 45 absolutely no in between
Fuck, I guess I gotta get off. See you again in about 3 years.
Hell yeah, my geocities Nine Inch Nails fan site helped build the Internet
