I’ve been exploring the fediverse and subbing and posting all over the damn place. Realizing lemmy can federate with kbin blew my mind. Not to mention the possibility of turning my old laptop into a personal server to host my own instance. Is this what it felt like to discover how the internet worked in the 90s?
Could you talk more about how your experience with Lemmy has brought back those feelings? I remember the sense of wonder I felt when browsing the web in the early '00s, when every personal website, PHP board and IRC community was unique and discovering a new website/community was really exciting. I still feel this sense of wonder when I visit content-rich websites from that era, such as amasci.com, https://atlas.limsi.fr/ and https://sciencemadness.org/talk/.
What I’ve seen from Lemmy brings me back to the early years of Reddit, but I’m yet to find anything that really brings back the way I felt when I started browsing the web. But maybe I just haven’t explored enough?
The whole fediverse thing is what really takes me back to my first days on the internet, because after some years, the way the internet works in general became common knowledge, so nothing felt new, or the things that were really new, were actually just stupid concepts (Take for example NFTs that rised in popularity last year, people said it would change the future and the way the internet works, but it actually was just a dumb pyramid scheme and it led to nothing, even to this day i have no idea how it works.)
But the federation is a genuinely interesting system that is different from everything i’ve seen in the past years. The concept of anyone hosting conglomerates of communities in their own house or even in a dedicated server, while all those instances communicate with eachother is mind boggling for me, and the fact that none of this is owned by a company truly reinforces the feeling of community. The fediverse feels like a part of the internet that is yet to be explored, and while i don’t understand it completely, there’s still much to learn and discover. Browsing through Lemmy doesn’t feel just like a daily dopamine rush activity just like Reddit, it genuinely feels like i’m interacting, contributing and being part of it, something i haven’t felt for a long time tbh.
The feeling of ownership, of oh I can go host an instance at home and knowing that you aren’t at the whim of corporate admins or a company’s poor fortune, is so incredibly cool. I really hope more decentralized/selfhostable alternatives to major services start to take off.
Absolutely agreed
I think for me Lemmy is providing a portal to those places because the content posted here tends to be more 'high effort digital garden’ type links than low effort attention grabbers.
I dont think lemmy is necessarily doing anything to make this true, its just that its new and the people participating are more likely to be motivated by altruistic reasons, or just everyday human behavioral reasons, than the profit-making or attention-seeking we might see on ‘popular’ sites like reddit.
edit: however maybe the ‘federated’ nature will keep influence spread enough that the big system-gamers won’t try to setup shop? we will see. Either way I like it here for now
Also, to be fair, there’s much less of a system to game in the first place, because you don’t have an overall karma score, so there’s not really any incentive to karma farm.
I didn’t realize that. Thats nice, no one liked karma farming.
I think kind of depends on how deeply you explored the instance list to find and instance that really vibes with you and makes you feel like excited to join. If you join one of the major ones like lemmy.ml or lemmy.world or shit just works or another one of the big instances, it’ll just feel like the early days of Reddit — young and active and exciting because it’s a new platform but not particularly unique feel or culture or anything because they’re just general purpose instances that let anyone in and so kind of end up with a common denominator internet culture. If you really go far down the instance list, though, and find an instance with less than a hundred users that has a really particular theme, target audience, and user culture, like I did, then it feels radically different than any other social media platform. I think that being on the big instances kind of hides the fact that Lemmy is super decentralized, just like the early internet, and so can give rise to really niche, unique, diverse, and interesting communities.
Lemmy reminds me of discovering Usenet and experimenting with various Usenet clients, going down rabbit holes in the communities and so on.
Or discovering a good mailing list back in the day.
That’s the bilbo baggins effect. That yearning for a past that doesn’t exist because you’ve grown so much and it’s changed and maybe it was never how you remembered it in the first place.
As far as I can see it existed and still exists though, it’s just that there is less incentive to produce this kind of content and leave it open. I can find pieces of it still remaining, but the environment that favored this kind of content is gone. It’s a natural result of how the system changes as people learn to game it and find ways to gain power or make it profitable. I hope the advent and growth of places such as this one gives it some fresh air, though.
There are modern websites that still bring those feelings to me. For example, this blog has impressed me with its content and creative visualizations: https://ciechanow.ski/ Personal websites and web forums just don’t surface anymore when searching the web or browsing large communities/aggregators, but I can find them on places such as https://curlie.org/ (A modern-day web directory) and https://search.marginalia.nu/ (a search engine that focuses on non-commercial websites).