Do you remember the early days of the internet, when websites were a reflection of their creators unique personalities and passions? A time when the d
  • Gray@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think we’re all a bit disillusioned with it now. I feel like on the 2000’s era internet we all were showing up bright eyed and optimistic about the possibilities. We lived in a world without the internet and having it felt like a superpower. But in the 2010’s and especially around 2016, the misinformation pump got turned on hard and we saw the internet bring some truly sinister real world events to fruition. SEO started getting used more and more through the 2010’s. Social media companies started finding nasty ways to profit off of us by being more selective in what we see. And now this has been the year of enshittification with big companies finally making moves that actively worsen our experiences in order to cash in on a lot of investment money that never turned into anything real. Basically I think what happened is a mixture of people becoming more cynical and the internet becoming over-automated and now this year businesses finally realizing that potential profit is worthless without acting on it.

    With all that said though, the Fediverse feels like our chance to finally fight back. Lemmy still only has around 60k monthly active users. We need to try to bring that number up.

    • Olap@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Why bring it up? More people rarely add more value past N. I suppose the better question is what is N? I’m loving lemmy right now, do we really need the cesspit that was large subreddits?

      • Gray@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Well, for context, Mastodon has around 1.5 million monthly active users. Twitter/Reddit are around 450 million monthly active users. You can enjoy Lemmy’s small size but also see that at 60k monthly active users it hasn’t even reached a size comparable to many other famous small sized forums. I don’t know what N is. I personally think the Fediverse should be the replacement for corporate social media and that social media can be essential in how information spreads through society. It can decide elections. It can shift society’s views on issues. I think it does us a disservice to go the hipster route and cling to our small niche thing and resist growth. The beauty of Lemmy is that there will always be small communities regardless. Anyone who wants a small community need only defederate from the big servers and stick to a small, niche server.

      • SupraMario@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Trump is what they’re pointing out, but I think they’re forgetting all the prior years of complete false information during bush and Obama. This isn’t something just recently popping up, it’s been going on for a while now, Trump just made it a lot louder.