It costs money to run these things so monetization always rears its head.
It is for me, but I have my doubts that the majority will avoid the corporate-owned spaces.
Depends on where you live, but in the US I think there will be a sharp divide between two general groups: a minority who put some thought into what they do, and the vast meme-ified masses who accept whatever is laid out for them.
I think it’s always going to be a sort of long-tail phenomenon, with most people involved in the biggest platforms, but a large number of small platforms that attract a minority of the overall population.
I think by now we have figured out the majority of people are garbage and you only want to spend time with a select group. Discord seems to have this figured out.
The only thing which has changed is the medium.
astronaut holding gun meme.jpg
we’ve always been garbage.
I don’t think we have. Some people theorise that the tower of babel really happened. Whether you’re religous or not doesn’t really matter but it shows that during the earliest recorded days humanity wanted to help each other and everyone by building a tower. There are theories as to why god didn’t allow the tower to reach them so then the blame is put on god, not humanity.
Esperanto ftw.
The theological explanation I’ve been hearing recently for that is that God didn’t want humanity to be a monolithic entity, but rather to have many different flavors and cultures. Supporting evidence is that in Revelation there is reference to all of the nations and tribes on the Earth being represented in heaven. Meaning that those cultures are retained, minus the worst parts of them. It’s actually a great argument for intentional diversity and allowing people groups to maintain their uniqueness rather than assimilate into a global conglomerate.
But to play devil’s advocate (pun very much intended) in the gnostic scripture of the nag Hamadi it straight up says whoever parctipated in the tower of babel will go to hell. Why punish people when they thought they were doing good? And the nag hamadi also says whatever happens in the world is god’s will. Meaning every single event in history whether good or bad is because god wanted it that way. So according to the nag hamadi god wanted all the wars, all the climate change, all the confusion, all the rape and murder is because god wanted it. Why aren’t we born with knowledge of every language if god wanted diverse languages? That way people will choose the language they speak rather than it being forced upon them from wherever they’re born. The nag hamadi actually answers every existential question if you read it objectively without any pre existing beliefs in my personal view. We don’t have any free will on earth according to the nag hamadi and this is the only universe that exists.
There are a lot of gnostic writings but they don’t hold much value. They were essentially rejected when they were written. You did ask an interesting question though, why we aren’t born with knowledge of every language if God wanted to diverse languages.
I’ve read theology about this as well, and the answer that I’m hearing at the moment regarding that has to do with the speaking in tongues that was released at Pentecost. On that occasion, there were people from many other regions assembled in Jerusalem and when they began to speak in tongues, people from foreign lands heard their own native tongue spoken clearly. The way it’s described, it seems even the dialects were correct.
It’s not clear if that was a miracle of being able to speak in a language they didn’t understand, or if it was a miracle of understanding. But it does seem to be a reversal of the confusion that was caused by the multiple languages at the tower of Babel, yet retaining the diversity and also creating unity. The inferred implication is that the same kind of understanding will be available in eternity when all of the brokenness of this world is restored with a new heaven and new Earth.
Naw, it was just divide and rule.
It depends on the discord. I joined a discord where the most narcissistic people were there and they singled me out for whatever reason because I wasn’t just simply going with their thinking. There was another member that thought like me but their own narcissi tendencies made up a conspiracy theory that somehow that was my alt. I didn’t even know the guy irl. It’s a shame as I was interested in the subject matter of the discord but I guess if enough village idiots own a discord, the smart villager is seen as the idiot.
Some majorities are bigger than others.
The future is the past!
Curated experiences are the reason we’re in the shit right now.
But yeah, maybe boutique curated exepriences will somehow be qualitatively different, and not just finer market segmentation.
Not all of Reddit works, but some of it does for some people, and the reason it works for them is because the moderators shape communities that the community members enjoy participating in.
Personally, I think active communities below the Dunbar number (about 150) in size are some of the most rewarding to participate in, long term. But, there are always a lot of people who flock to wherever the biggest crowds are.
I think they meant human-curated.
I’d say genuine. Genuine experiences. Sharing shit for sharing’s sake. Not for better SEO. Not for profit. Just unadulterated human expression.
That’s how I envision using the internet for entertainment in the near future. I’ll still use the shitty corporate sites when I must, for transactional browsing. I’m not going to pretend I can push Amazon, Microsoft, Google, online banking, etc. out of my life just like that.
But I will actively seek authentic spaces. They will be a tad smaller than your average social network, Reddit, and whatnot. But I’m certain they’re out there and more people will join me in this search and populate these small spaces as time goes on.
Lemmy, Mastodon, the IndieWeb movement. The first steps. I hope to find more!
Smaller communities don’t get targeted for commercial exploitation. But, then, something has to support them even if they don’t cost much to run - they still cost something, both for bandwidth/storage and moderation/curation effort.
Of course. I have nothing against Fediverse server admins setting up a Patreon —ideally Liberapay— or something similar to receive donations to cover running costs. I have and continue to contribute financially to indie devs or server admins when I can.
Not everyone will do that of course. But there again, running stuff at a small scale shouldn’t be crazy expensive either. The operational costs of keeping a microblog or indie site running are little to none. I host my blog and all of my side projects for free in a cloud provider.
Running a Fediverse server is more expensive. Last time I looked into what it would roughly cost to stand up a barebones stack to host a Mastodon server in a public cloud, it was like a hundred bucks a month. Not cheap but it may be big enough to house a couple thousand users. If at least 0.5% of your userbase donated some money to cover running costs, you might be ok.
Alternatively, if you have a server lying around at home, loads of people self-host at home, which is a tad cheaper.
I’m not saying a fully decentralised indie internet wouldn’t have its shortcomings, of course. I’m just saying I’d happily take that over the current state of the web.
so lemmy.
Divide and conquer I guess
Links like that feel like the time I first had access to the Internet. Kinda weird but very very interesting. Thank you.
Full disclosure: I’ve been part of that cluster of communities for a couple years now. Best advice i have to give to anyone is to take their time. The speed of conversation often slows way WAY down.
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You think the current US would stop at Canada and Mexico?
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I think the future of the internet is darknets for example Veilid.
The darknets are here, have been here, but are by definition: dark, so unless you’re in one they’re useless to you.
First rule of darknet membership: don’t talk about the darknet.
Unless something’s changed in the last few years, the darknet is too difficult for normies to use.
Your worldbuilding is in SciFi classics tier, but it’s missing all of the global South.
Australia is already more locked out, but its Internet can only exist in function of US.
…smaller communities
So like it was before the dawn of Reddit and social media?
Sign me the fuck up. I miss my dumb little websites with a dodgy layout full of terribly cropped gifs.
But how will we find any of these small sites with the dogshit search is lately.
Webrings, index pages, pure chance
I do not hold with this, at all. After leaving Twitter two years ago, and going to Mastodon, and Mbin, when the world started to come to an end three weeks ago, when Trump flipped to making the US and ally of Russia against the world, I needed to be plugged in, so with years of reservations against supporting anything fucking Jack was involved in (he’s still the largest single shareholder of bluesky stock, so fuck off telling me he stepped away from the board), I finally signed up for Bluesky, because when shit is going down, I don’t need to be browsing some lefty tankie currated community for realtime news, I need to be jacked in to the widest collective there is, so I can parse and disseminate information for every source possible.
That’s fine, but don’t mistake being jacked in for action.
Bluesky with a few US politics blocklists is a decent experience.
I’m finding it just like Twitter used to be (which is what I heard it was, and expected before I signed up), minus the overt Nazis, and able to weed out the AntiSemites easily enough with an actual “fuck off into the shadow realm i can’t see you you can’t see me” block function, as apposed to what Mbin/Lemmy offer which is simply masking
Maybe the idea behind those smaller communities is that they’d be focused on things like fishing and kite surfing. Social media that are even remotely popular have become football stadiums where people constantly need to pledge allegiance to their teams and that’s just really boring now.
the world is now gripped in the great struggle between democracy and fascist disassembly with the worlds only superpower squarely onside with a criminal fascist government of russia with no regard for human life even of it’s own citizens, with Billions of real lives on the line all around the world, a great many of us will be fighting over tinned beans and rainwater in the next years, there is nothing boring about being able to prepare yourself to keep your family and loved ones as protected as you can, with forewarning, and kite surfing ain’t gonna do that. fishing will become more and more useful though, that’s a good one.
I’m a news junkie but you’re kidding yourself if you think staying on top of things can affect anything. Now is a good time to review reliability of news sources that you’re using, not add even more. To me it sounds like you’re about to create an enormous bubble / echo chamber where you can no longer recognise any self faults. It’s now more important than ever to see reality all of us created. Please be mindful of your mental health or you’ll end up with anxiety attacks.
word salad
I think you just proved their point.
Compartmentalize the people, conquer their minds. Machiavelli’s divide and conquer.
We should be able to bootstrap activityPub to GeoCities websites. WordPress integration is taking a long time.
That’s backwards, activitypub is higher level than websites. And you can literally make a website already and embed an activitypub stream
And preferably a bit harder to use to keep the script kiddies out.
Most small group forums have manual user validation with very specific questions.
I’ve seen stuff like “what is on the the 5th page of the user guide for this product” along with language/culture specific questions you can’t just easily google on forums that are focused on a specific area
I firmly believe that connecting people to their IRL friends is an important part of the potential of the Internet, as it is shown by Facebook, for example.
But I also believe there are people looking to connect with new people and finding a community where they can express themselves wholly. I think the current Internet is weak in this regard, weaker than it has been before, but I think it’s possible to build a place where people can connect.
Pretty much. I should be able tobmake friends with any human on earth with an internet connection. That this is still hard is something we need to fix
I have a friends Discord I set up a year before Covid, and for about a year only 3 people used it, mainly to play some games together.
But when Covid hit, it obviously gained some traction. And now it’s THE place I interact with friends since I’ve long ditched the likes of Facebook.
I keep going back and forth on whether or not to possibly set up a Mastodon server for friends. The hardest part would be convincing people to use it. But it could just be like our little shared space that could still interact with the wider world. It’d be kinda cool to have a Local feed be just people you know in real life.
“Silos” that echo.
