It’s honestly really sad what’s been happening recently. Reddit with the API pricing on 3rd party apps, Discord with the new username change, Twitter with the rate limits, and Twitch with their new advertising rules (although that has been reverted because of backlash). Why does it seem like every company is collectively on a common mission of destroying themselves in the past few months?
I know the common answer is something around the lines of “because companies only care about making money”, but I still don’t get why it seems like all these social media companies have suddenly agreed to screw themselves during pretty much the period of March-June. One that sticks out to me especially is Reddit CEO, Huffman’s comment (u/spez), “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive”. Like reading this literally pisses me off on so many levels. I wouldn’t even have to understand the context behind his comment to say, “I am DONE with you, and I am leaving your site”.
Why is it like this? Does everyone feel the same way? I’m not sure if it’s just me but everything seems to be going downhill these days. I really do hope there is a solution out of this mess.
It'll be interesting if any of these "owned by the people" platforms will establish themselves the same way the private social media companies have in the past. Mastodon is probably most successful when it comes to a decentralized platform but it's not the there for me at the moment when it comes to the user base.
You can argue that it's not supposed to be Twitter or whatever but you can't deny the usefulness of everyone being an user under the same address or the wealth of information that comes with being giant. Decentralized platforms have an inherent handicap since there will always be moderation that's up to the admin so every instance will differ in some way (and let's not get to the technical problems that at least here are prevalent). It's harder for companies, countries and other official sources to establish themselves because they subject themselves to moderation of a private third party and jumping from instance to instance, forgoing the extra work it is, is just disruptive and confusing to their audience. They could always start their own instance but that's also a lot of work compared to just creating a Twitter account. There might be some business angle here though but it all just seems too convoluted at least for now.
Maybe internet will be just different and less-centralized in the future. At least it's good that the profit seeking private companies have less power.
The internet used to be more decentralised. There were lots of smaller websites, blogs, forums etc, which people discovered via word of mouth, search engines, and forgotten things like webrings. It's only recently that big monolithic social media platforms took hold.
Tech is often cyclical, we could now be swinging back to a more decentralised web, but with the benefit of newer technologies. Right now it's almost a new "wild west" as new platforms appear and new ideas like federation are experimented with. Some will rise, some will fall, some will go off in the corner and do their own thing. While all that happens it's going to be a bit messy, much like it was in the 90s with the initial rise of the web.
I hope you're right, sounds quite exciting!
Could you describe what "webrings" were? I've read about them in a similar thread, but couldn't find any info on them.
I’ve been online since circa 1993 and for the first decade or so, discoverability was a challenge due to the lack of efficient search engines like Altavista or (later) Google.
Webrings consisted in individual website owners (e.g., on Geocities) placing one or more banners at the bottom of their webpage linking to other like-minded sites, typically in quid-pro-quo manner (I link to you, you link back to me), or to a manually-curated directory of like-minded sites.
This was when “surfing the web” meant exactly that - you would surf from one site to another using hyperlinking within web communities. Bookmarking was then how you kept track of the most interesting sites you came across.
Now there is hardly a need for hyperlinking and bookmarking, since much of the content is centralized on a few platforms, and search engines take care of the discoverability of niche content.
Phew I feel old remembering webrings lol. Crazy to think how much the internet has changed since those early days thirty years ago.
Anyone else remember Infoseek? It was my favorite search engine because you could select to search within results to refine your search down to a single page of relevant results.
I misread this ad thirteen and though, “haha silly it was 20 years ago.” Then re-read it and realized it said thirty.
Then I had to go sit down for a minute and contemplate my impending demise.
Oh god I feel old
It's ok, we're all gonna die.
Getting old sucks, but everyone's doing it.
Damn peer pressure!
Also all the people who think Usenet is just an obscure piracy mechanism.
Usenet was the greatest medium for discussion back in the early Internet days, and I'm excited that it's finally being recreated in the form of this Fediverse thing.
All the youngsters think federation is a brand new and exciting innovation. Time is a circle.
I feel like I should be yelling at those damned whippersnappers to get off my lawn, with all their Instagrams and Spotifies and Youtubes
Thanks. I now realized, how I came to that conclusion: Last time this was discussed the person called it "link ring" and that didn't not yield any reasonable results.
Edit: And because notifications for comment replies are deactivated by default I didn't even notice the person has corrected their wording. Still learning how to kbin :).
So back when search engines were in their infancy, webrings were kinda a big deal. Essentially, they were collections of topic-related websites that agreed to mutually link to each other so that people could find content related to the pages that they were visiting. They kinda died out after Yahoo bought webring.org (where most webrings were controlled) and replaced all the webring control pages hosted there with Yahoo pages, and by the time they let go of the domain contemporary search engines had mostly rendered webrings obselete.
However, there are definitely still webrings around. The official site of maia arson crimew (the hacktivist who made the news for leaking the no-fly list to select journalists) belongs to two webrings, for example. I can definitely see them making more of a comeback among computer enthusiasts if search engines enshittify themselves more.
interesting point
Yes! All of those interesting little nooks and crannies to explore. I'm glad that's coming back by way of the fediverse.
Don't fear decentralization Millennials, embrace it.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing while writing that comment. But I can't shake how cool it is to have every hobby, no matter how small or big, under the same roof, one click away. Someone should to make a search engine that serves this purpose and works well...
It's still early days.
Reddit has been pretty good at not walling off content, but think of all the forums that died and went to hell, being tortured in the afterlife as a facebook group, where all the knowledge people spend time writing down, all the questions being answered, are trapped in the facebook ecosystem, where it's close to impossible to find. This is by design too I believe. I used to be a mod on a hardware forum and we had rules that you needed to search before asking. The opponents to this rule said, that if people just searched, then the forum would die out (it didn't) and I'm quite certain that information on facebook is hidden away, to keep engagement going, by having the same shit being asked and answered over and over in perpetuity.
I like the idea of going back to forums, but with the added benefits of federation. It's the best of both worlds in my opinion.
Man, wouldn't they make for a tempting advertising market?
...wait
I miss the phpBB days. I was on some great forums and content was curated by people who were passionate about the topics. There were serious spaces, silly spaces, helpful spaces, and malevolent spaces. Google still did a decent job of surfacing real, user-generated content back then. You could always refine your search further to find niche information and that just doesn't work anymore. Everything is brand names and every company is trying to make their brand a verb.
This recent rebellion between platforms and communities has been interesting to watch. Communities are not locations in cyberspace, they're still people. Now, with the fediverse, thanks to open-source developers and the kind souls who coughed up some dough for server costs, we now have more choices of where we congregate online. I love threaded topic-based conversations so something like this place is exactly where I want to be. I think this unrest may level out in our favor, but if there's a potential for evil, some arrogant jackass will take it, so I don't expect it'll be an easy journey. Enjoying the wild west feel you pointed out, very 90s!
On the other hand, I think Fediverse is perfect for companies that want to be closer to their customers, as rare as that may be.
Another possible use case if Fediverse become popular enough is potential for companies like Nintendo setting up their own instance as the new Miiverse or something.
I wouldn't count on big companies ever going that route, to be honest. The decision-making people there will likely never trust Lemmy or similar software enough because it's not like them - not proprietary, not closed source, so they'll keep wasting money on making their own shitty websites with their own shitty forums if they ever want to give their communities an official place to hang out.
I can see it but there needs to be a big player first to set an example. Maybe it's Facebook or influencers suddenly flocking in. It won't be fast though.
Do we want companies using Lemmy/kbin/mastodon to advertise to us? If it’s useless to them, that’s awesome
Don't think of Mastodon like 1000 separate social media sites. Think of Mastodon, think of the Fediverse, like email. Lots of email goes through gmail, and maybe gmail works better with gmail. But email is more than gmail. But despite AOL's best efforts, despite google's best efforts, email is also yahoo, and outlook, and Proton, and MailChimp, and your college email address, and whatever mail server your company spun up, and if you feel like it whatever mail server you setup in your basement. And yes, email has had more complications over the years as google tries to strangle it. But it's the real open platform, and the Fediverse can join it.