I’m talking about what they say at 8:20:
Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The main difference to today was twofold:
For one there were no algorithms fighting to keep you online at any cost – at some point you were done with the internet for the day, as mind blowing as this may sound.
But more importantly: The old internet was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages gathering around shared beliefs and interests.
These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains. These communities worked because they mirrored real life much more than social media:
Each village had its own culture and set of rules. Maybe one community was into rough humour and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned easily.
If you didn’t play by the village rules, you would be banned – or you could just go and move to another village that suited you better.
So instead of all of us gathering in one place, overwhelming our brains at a townsquare that in the end just leads to us going insane, one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple:
go back to smaller online communities.
Maybe they’re soft launching on the fediverse 😄
Would love to see it. An explanation video on how the fediverse works, put out by Kurzgesagt, would be so helpful
Yeah but there’s literally nothing the Fediverse does better than a PHBB forum.
I actually hate the interconnected yet fragmented environment here - there’s absurd amounts of redundancies in communities, resulting in dead spaces; you don’t need 20 different federated servers all with their variations of the same communities, for example sports teams - you have fanaticus.social which is literally specifically for sports, but then every single local instance like midwest.social or lemmy.ca will have duplicate or even triplicate communities. This does nothing but make the whole platform seem big and empty and bereft of users or interactions.
I think once a community gets popular, the duplicates die away or act as backups when an instance goes down. That’s generally a good thing because instances have disappeared overnight, and Lemmy is still in development
We had a movies&tv instance that was popular, and then it disappeared overnight so the smaller local instances took over till we got a new popular one
!moviesandtv@lemm.ee for people wondering
“literally nothing”
As if PHPBB forums didn’t have duplicated subforums
If they were properly curated, they didn’t. It’s not like an admin from any other instance can delete duplicate communities from other instances.
Why would the admin of one PHPBB forum “curate” subforums on another PHPBB forum? If you had 10 different PHPBB forums about politics in separate countries, they would all have a “world” subforum (or something similarly named) in each. The only thing happening with the fediverse is that you’re actively seeing what would happen if PHPBB forums were connected.
Admins can block them though. Infinite communties in infinite combinations makes a lot more sense when you think about content moderation. Like- imagine if the only politics community Reddit allowed was run by the r/conspircacy mods.
The fediverse is basically like PhPBB forums with a single login.
That’s partilly more on the people creating duplicates without looking if the community doesn’t exist already.
Granted, the lemmy explorer tool might not be around for too long for people to be easily able to - since someone on you instance needs to known a community exists on other instance and access it for everyone to see it. And some people might just not be aware of it as well.
Are you talking about https://lemmyverse.net/ ? Why should it disappear?
What I meant is I have no idea how long it exists, so people might not have the luxury of using it to check for existing communities.
Didn’t mean to start a panic with bad wording :)
I see. Hopefully it will stay around, or an equivalent will emerge :)
I do too! Its incredibly handy
If they were talking about anything specific, as hard to believe as it is, there is actually another community based website out there slightly larger than lemmy that allows you to subscribe to your interests and unsubscribe from others.
Facebook?
Reddit
What’s reddit?
No one knows
Weird ass name
Reddit or my username???
Unfortunetly for most people “go back to smaller online communities” would probably mean going from XTwitter to a Facebook group…
All of these things still exist. Theres just massive cities now, and they’re shitty like cities in real life.
I learned a lot, and made a lot of IRL friends, on various message boards over the years. ADVrider.com used to be a lot of fun but I haven’t checked it out lately. One thing that was cool was looking for vehicle-specific forums, like a forum for EX-500’s or F150’s. These forums were great for keeping whatever car you have running, and were full of knowledge on the problems found in specific cars. A lot of them still exist.
just saw it
