The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.
It’s a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I’ve noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.
I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.
You don’t consider Lemmy to be social media?
For me, “Social Media™” requires algorithm based media to be delivered to you without your input and heavy advertisement model attached that introduces corptate bias.
Lemmy is more like a fancy forum. Not quite the same as old bbs forums, but still better then twitter, facebook and whatever the hell reddit is becoming.
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.
This has been the majority take since like 2015 or so. It’s very eternal September-adjacent as well, in that everybody thinks their vision of the Internet is the correct one and everyone else is a poser or just wrong and ruining it for them.
Small forums always did exist and always will exist. That cannot and will not change
This is true, though internet gatekeepers can keep people from being able to find these forums.
The extent to which that’s possible is debatable.
I think it’s simply that there’s less incentive to find or to host those small forums.
Social media brought all the normies into the internet. Normies ruin everything.
Same reflection
Give me back my ICQ and Prodigy Internet you damned Gen Z!
It’s all about the money honey…
Yeah its definitely just you…
https://medium.com/@darianoneil/because-the-internet-how-social-media-ruined-music-ec2022282aa4
https://listverse.com/2021/05/24/top-10-ways-social-media-is-ruining-the-world/
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/long-youtube-videos-tiktok/677130/
https://knowyourbest.com/social-media-ruined-society/
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_social_media_brings_out_the_worst_in_us
If it’s just the op, then where did all these articles come from!? Social media for ants!?
Not really, no. Social Medias can and will exist at any scale, some more or less harmful than others. For example, even Lemmy is filled with people spreading propaganda for foreign dictatorships.
We should take the good with the bad and takes steps to protect our own rights and privacy while helping others do the same. Just as people did during the dawn of the internet, when scams we easily recognize today were unknown dangers before.
social media has destroyed the spirit of the internet?
I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.
I mean, Lemmy is social media. You might dislike centralized social media or something, but…
The problem with centralized social media is it replaced all aspects of free speach and public opinion with algorithms that keep you hooked while all your personal information is being sold and given away. It doesn’t have to be that way. Learn about free software, what it means, it’s history, and it’s impact on the world today. Learn about the fediverse. Most importantly, don’t expect things to change if you don’t. https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software
I am sure most people on lemmy are already familiar of FSF and Libre Software, I suspect most of them are linux users.
Its the majority of the non tech and lurker folks who have come to other social media who mindlessly consume content without any interaction that has converted the Internet to the cable TV which it was trying to replace as the primary form of entertainment.
Nah. Just corpos.
It’s not 2017-18 social media, friend. It’s just late state capitalism.
And the lion’s share of it can be traced to increasing real estate and rent prices.
It’s not social media that did it. It’s monopolistic, unregulated, greedy, giant tech corporations that made the internet shitty.
Exactly, early social media was tons of fun. It was like the early internet but easier since anyone could make a profile with any info.
Then it had to be monetized. They had to glue eyeballs via attention, no matter what kind. Now it’s all rent seeking, innovation is 100% about what can produce an immediate return, no care for the long term. The grift economy…
It was not social media, that was about the people. It’s what the social media companies did in search of dollars that did it in. Greed. Full stop.
Thanks to Lemmy and Linux I’ve been enjoying the internet in much the same way for some time now.
I even use a desktop PC on a daily basis and it just feels right.
Well, it’s desktop PC but I have the main monitor on an arm so that it can hover over my lap while on the couch. I’m a middle aged dad and my family likes to hang out in the same room together, so it is much more practically usable for me as a couchtop.
