Mastodon toot:
Daniel Lakeland @dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
Fediverse, the social media system for 40+ year old people who built the world wide web and regret it.
Oct 01, 2026, 11:32 PM
Yeah. A bunch of old out of touch uncs with no personality outside of nostalgia for old internet platforms they got banned from, racism and misogyny.
With inflated egos about how much they actually mattered (seriously, built the world wide web).
Such a healthy platform that won’t just slowly shrivel up and die.
You rang?
Also for people with severe superiority complexes
who are all wrong. Clearly I’m the most superior.
See, this is why I love Lemmy. The good parts are like everyone’s grey beard uncles got together and are all trying to tell the best goofball jokes.
Why did you repeat what op said
Wow, wrong, and what an ignorant point of view.
(/s) :)
I don’t regret it. I only regret letting the corporations stake their claim without greater pushback.
The slow creep was real. Social media corporations brought the mainstream to the internet in the worst possible way, but the old internet was still alive in forums and chats and discussion groups that had been around for years.
Reddit destroyed it. It gathered everyone into one place. It was constantly growing and pulled users from everywhere else in the internet to one place. Centralization. Then, it inevitably went corpo to the point that the greed of the ones on top destroyed the communities they gathered and exploited to put themselves in their elevated positions of wealth.
To be clear, the people with the money don’t care at all. They cashed out and got theirs. Everything burns around their greed, no different from oil companies.
The internet was supposed to connect everyone, share ideas, connect the world to collective knowledge, and bring us all together. Instead, it became a tool of corporatist and fascist control. Reddit ultimately ended up being the corpo that crushed and scattered the opposition.
Social media corporations brought the mainstream to the internet in the worst possible way
Eloquently said.
A decent chunk of local businesses don’t have a web presence besides Meta products. Meta would love to be “the internet”, they had a project in early 2010’s to give free “internet” in developing countries. The catch, the internet received was restricted to Facebook. It was called out by net neutrality advocates as being very anticompetitive and India rejected the project in 2016. Even a decade ago the zucc had been using underhanded tactics to put as many eyes on his propaganda machines.
Why should some jackass amass as much wealth as a nation state by siphoning pennies from every other interaction on the planet?
Link to BBC article about India rejecting free internet below.
India blocks Zuckerberg’s free net app Published
- 8 February 2016
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35522899
… launched in 2013 as Internet.org and was offered in 36 countries - had brought more than 19 million people online …
When Facebook came around, I immediately saw what it would lead to. Hell, just the thought of sharing your personal details for anyone and everyone to read was extremely creepy to me. Any time I tried to communicate this to people asking me why I wasn’t on Facebook it achieved nothing. Pushback was useless, people want what they perceive as “convenience” even when they have to (almost literally) sell their souls to the machine. No, I don’t think pushback would have helped, because people want these - and I shudder to call them such - services. The Internet was doomed the day it became mainstream.
When I was young, I was called a nerd for using computers. People online were primarily nerds who cared about tech. Those days are long gone, and there was nothing that could’ve been done to prevent the rot. It was inevitable as the Internet became more popular.
The masses will always be asses. They don’t care. They will eat corporate slop and ask for seconds until their bloated corpses burst. The best we can do is create alternative infrastructures and wait with horror as they start to rot too.
Jesus, I think I’m having a bit of a blue day.
Yep. That is the regret.
“The best time to join the fediverse is 10 years ago, second best time is today.”
Wayne Gretzky- Michael Scott
- aizakku
Accurate.
I’m 39 and 3 months, thankyouverymuch, so I DO NOT fit the demographic!
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Ditto
Ditto.
sensual pottery scene
Team sport 😬
I’m going with cuck porn on this one
But not too big a team, it gets ruined once you get too big
Uhhh Go Team !!! (insert hey mickey gif) lol
Go Sports!
not accurate
I winced.
Is your back giving you trouble, too?
There are some lost kids wandering around complaining about their moms…
I dunno how they found it into here.
you leave my muddah out 'o this!
The great thing about the Internet is that people can just find stuff, often by accident.
Well, people used to be able to do that. Nowadays, IDK…
I accidentally stumbled upon the Wikipedia article about Sad Clowns when I was looking for that picture of the happy/sad face from theater.
I have mixed feelings about what I read today. :|
I found myself in comparable spaces for the time too. Spend enough time online and you hear about things.
complaining about their +70 year old mom
Oh I can do that, this woman sits in her chair all day watching right wing youtube and complaining about her failing health. God forbid she take a walk or get a hobby!
Not 40, but also don’t want my thoughts and comments to be an income stream for a for-profit organization, whether that be by selling my data for profit or contributing to an inescapable network effect that can be increasingly monetized by various means.
The modern social media platform is not designed to foster positive interactions, but rather to maximize shareholder value.
don’t want my thoughts and comments to be an income stream for a for-profit organization
(…)
The modern social media platform is not designed to foster positive interactions, but rather to maximize shareholder value.
This is so much more important than whatever elitism OOP implies.
I’m also not 40 btw.
also don’t want my thoughts and comments to be an income stream for a for-profit organization
I mean, you’re fooling yourself if you don’t believe Lemmy has been scrapped by a thousand crawlers by now.
I’m more paranoid about how many accounts are bots than about some data aggregator getting my dumbshit hot takes as training data.
I mean, you’re fooling yourself if you don’t believe Lemmy has been scrapped by a thousand crawlers by now.
That’s why we’re here. To fu k with the scrapers and poison the training 🙃
Equal access for all is still better than one company controlling access to my content for the purposes of monetization.
Dw, the corpos are using bots to scrape and categorize your thoughts and comments anyway.
My take is that the fediverse is nice because it’s still in its pre-enshittification phase. Give it time.
Hopefully its design makes it resistant to enshittification.
Depends… if enshittification just means corporate control and advertising, I have high hopes for the design. If enshittification also includes things like personal insults, echo chambers and gatekeeping, those ships have already sailed as expected.
enshittification just means corporate control and advertising
That is what enshittification means. It is specifically a corporation making it’s product shittier because they’ve cornered the market.
Thanks, silly me assumed a word like “enshittification” would just mean “made shitty”.
“Enshittification” has a more specific meaning than just “things getting shitty.” It’s about a product or service being purposefully made worse in order for the company controlling it to extract more profit by means more underhanded and exploitative than just raising the price.
Forum toxicity (sans some algorithm or bot farm egging it on for some nefarious purpose) is categorically a different thing than enshittification.
The Fediverse can’t enshittify in its current state because it’s not controlled by a corporation. In order for it to happen, it would have to be overwhelmed by federating with Threads or something like that.
It’s designed to resist corpo capture via interoperability… if it starts enshittifying, hopefully this will allow users to shift over without incurring too much switching cost keeping them in place
I know the theory, but it really just puts enshittification in different hands.
Well, you are using world, which is like the reddit of lemmy
So was the united States… Lol. But I’m hoping for better here
The whole point of decentralisation/federation is that it’s enshittification proof. If one services goes bad, users can move away and continue to maintain their network effect.
true.
Wanna see us do it again? 💪 let’s do this, team
I’m about half that age, and I’ve met at least a couple grads and undergrad students on here that I assumed were also in their 20s…
Welcome! You certainly don’t have to match the stereotypes to fit in around here.
20 year old reporting for duty
Hah, you said duty.
I just turned 24. I like my internet smol.
I just wanted my Geocities page back.
And IRC.
And MUDs.
Heh, back before the web, I recall there were two people hogging the modems in the library: IRC users and MUD users. I guess we’re here now.
The Disc world Mud is still around
A lot of us still use IRC.
Yeah, I know. But the old main IRC spanish network is mostly dead since MS messenger. Still exists, but channnels are empty or are only people looking for sex.
Yeah totally! Getting voiced was like being knighted. Hope my homies on DALnet are doing alright.
I just made a neocities page, highly recommend
Had no idea this was a thing. I’ll get one up tomorrow!
If it’s cool, share it!
Honestly really glad, I’m tired of reading teenager opinions everywhere on the Internet
:old-man-yells-at-clouds-meme:
Plenty of old people with stupid takes too
I still want to read bad takes, that’s not the issue here
Joke’s on you: my opinions are just as bad.
Yeah? Well I also have shit opinions.
I think mine are the best there is. I do have a problem with objective judgment though
I think mine are the best there is.
Likelihood of teenager.
I do have a problem with objective judgment though
Evidence of self-awareness, personal reflection, and confidence enough to admit personal shortcomings: Definitely not a teenager.
D’oh 😖
So my opinions are automatically worthless just because I’m 19?
I didn’t say that, me not wanting to read them doesn’t make them worthless
minors not being listened to/having autonomy is the foundation of most things wrong with this world :(
Strong claim
You can debate me on it if you like…
Agreed
I think a lot of you are projecting, lol
I love young people. My volunteer little sister just graduated and I used to work with trafficking victims. Listening to young people one-on-one is important and rewarding, I hope for both of us.
Reading a hasty thought from someone who doesn’t even know who they are yet every 30 seconds on the Internet on websites like reddit, where people skew really young, and taking that extremely seriously is not enjoyable, for adults or for them. And unfortunately, whatever stupid thing people say gets preserved on the Internet for WAY too long, all the more reason to disregard it quickly, but people really struggle with that online.
I’ve fucking known who I am since I was 12, no one would accept it or believe me or give me bodily autonomy or let me learn actually useful things instead of religion at school, or let me not wear religious and gender invalidating clothing
I’m really sorry you went through that
😑
Sadly that’s how some people think
Sadly, yes.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that age automatically makes one wise, but yes, inexperience does automatically make one naïve.
I think there’s two general kinds of people on the fediverse: Those who believe in whatever freedom, security, privacy, whatever, and the rest of us that came from somewhere else that went off the deep end of enshittification.
I am bolth
Oof. “Porque” is “because” Por qué" is “why”. lol
But… yes. :) ¿Por qué no los dos? :)
So then “because of both” - seems legit!! 😜
No hablas Espangol
See senyor
i’m 39 and haven’t built shit but the regret is real
By commenting this on a federated platform, you have contributed to the open web. The fediverse is nothing if there’s no content / interactions, like your comment. I know what you mean and it might not seem like much, but you are building shit.
