I’ve been exploring the fediverse and subbing and posting all over the damn place. Realizing lemmy can federate with kbin blew my mind. Not to mention the possibility of turning my old laptop into a personal server to host my own instance. Is this what it felt like to discover how the internet worked in the 90s?
In the 90s it always felt exciting to go online and see what interesting things you could find. There was no AI driven dopamine feed to keep you doom-scrolling passively for hours - you had to actually go looking for stuff. You’d stumble an interesting website, then follow links from there to other things. Finding a cool website felt like an accomplishment. It really felt like something special.
The internet has now turned into half a dozen walled gardens blindly trying to “maximize engagement” at all costs. They’re all competing to just retain eyeballs as long as possible with low effort content shoved down your throat.
The rest is a bunch of blogspam fighting for the top page of Google. There’s no use even bothering to search for things anymore, because no matter what you search for it’ll be a bunch of low effort “Top ten” lists, probably written by AI, containing just enough superficial bullshit optimized for SEO to make it to the front page of Google.
Wikipedia is probably one of the few places you can still experience what the 90s internet was like. You can spend hours going down a rabbit hole, but it doesn’t push anything on you. It’s just there, waiting to be discovered, if you want it.
When i first heard about the fediverse, my immediate reaction was “What a novel idea, but that won’t work” before taking a moment to remember that’s just how everything used to work. The Fediverse is just Usenet.
I’ve just become so brainwashed by the dystopian hellhole of the 2020’s Internet that I forgot what it was, and what it could become again.
This is the thing that excites me the most about the fediverse. If we can keep it from being monopolized by corporations, it will become a reflection of what the old internet used to be.
I think one of the key things that will prevent the capture of the Fediverse by corporations is never ever allowing whitelists for instance defederation and blocking to happen.
If that ever does happen, it becomes trivially easy to break the decentralized network up into a few centralized silos that are all disconnected from the rest of the network completely, whereas, the way it stands now, you have to explicitly block anyone you don’t want to be connected to, so it’s a great way to deal with bad actors and nasty instances, but makes it extremely hard to wall off your instance completely, because if you block another instance it’s trivially easy for the people that are unhappy with that to find or create a small new instance that flies under the radar and allows them to see the content on both the instance they left and the incense it blocked. It also makes it incredibly hard to capture people on your instance because they can always create a small instance and use that instance to see the content on the instance they left.
I think also limiting block list size for instances (but not users!) Could be a really good way of doing this too because then any instance I want to block a ton of other instances is going to have to fork lemmy to lift that band and then everyone will know they did that and know to get off it.
I agree, but take a small look at email. Email is the way it is currently (basically 3 providers, if you aren’t on their specific “good people” list then your emails get nowhere, residential IPs are considered bad by default, a single configuration miss dooms your server forever) because it was hard to maintain an email server, and even harder to combat spam. The fediverse is not immune to spam, but it does have the advantage that there is no expectation of privacy, and thus it is possible to have moderators filter spam. But that’s a hard ask. Email became that way because only large corporations were able to write good filters.
I won’t argue that there is a possibility that things could go wrong for federated and a decentralized social networks like Lemmy and Mastodon, and we are going to have to fight a cultural and technological battle against that, but I think at least this is a very good start, and I don’t think it inherently has to go that way either.
Thank you for articulating what I’ve been trying to. I had the same knee jerk reaction to the fediverse, but you’re exactly right. Yes, it’s easier to find things to doomscroll in the corporate “web 2.0” glossy version of the internet, but it’s also designed to make us forget that comes with a cost. I’m realizing that so much has become like the blow molded plastic Step 2 brand Cozy Coupe version of what things used to be. There are fewer sharp corners, but the trade off is that it’s a simplified, AI curated version of the whole.
I don’t exactly know what this is yet, I’m not sure how it’s going to evolve, and a lot of it feels very raw… but that’s also part of what makes it exciting. It’s going to be fun.
I feel like the fediverse is similar to email servers. No one company controls email. Each email provider can set up their own rules, etc.
Let’s not forget reddit was also like this for a very long time, that’s why many loved it.
I also have good feelings for the fediverse, really hope this will turn everything around and last.
+1 on Wikipedia, I still love browsing it. The amount of interesting things you can learn is amazing! The world is a wacky place.
The difference is that wikipedia still has this “all of the hallways look the same” feeling (which to be clear is good for an encyclopedia), to me it doesnt really feel like the old web. IMO, the fediverse and Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) are the only things left of it.
I miss the old internet before it became the bland corporate landscape we have now.