BACK IN MY DAY (jk my day is ongoing 😜), many popular sites were called “e/n” sites. This was like before blogs, before Google, etc. Back then, the web wasn’t very feature-rich, but it was “loud.” Contrast that with now: there are more sites than ever and wayyyyyyy more users than in the late 90s, but the www is very quiet and isolated (or isolating? I’m not sure how to phrase it).
Anyway, I think about this a lot, and I came to Lemmy to escape the labyrinth of marketing funnels that we call the www, but the element I can’t quite figure out is like where’s the social element on the web? I see many forums for like whatever niche subject, but where is the e/n chatter? Where do people like…be people in a very general sense? I was looking at the …sublemmies I follow, and they’re all like niche stuff. I really don’t even know where to post this question (so please pardon me if I screwed up and feel free to redirect me).
In essence, where – if anywhere – do people interact with people online?
@jtzl@lemmy.zip @asklemmy@lemmy.world
I don’t recall the specific “e/n websites”, but I do remember a time where the Web was a more connective place. I used to participate in Orkut communities, MSN groups (wasn’t a native feature, instead it was a third-party plug-in I can’t recall the name), Yahoo Messenger, IRC (not ICQ) channels on Freenode, etc.
Even though some of these things still exist (Escargot IM reviving MSN services; IRC is still a thing), the past Web is long gone. Now it’s Cloudflare and captchas and Anubis challenges, ads, clickbaits, paywalls, subscriptions, AI everywhere…
Yeah, there’s Fediverse and other decentralized places. Except that those places, including the Fediverse, depends on an infrastructure (Internet) which is increasingly closing on itself like a pangolin (or an Ouroboros, eating itself)… Once Internet closes itself due to the synergy of forces acting against it, there’ll be nowhere else to flee from enshittification. Maybe Meshtastic, but I don’t know how much it’d manage to become a haven for us, how much it’d be able to resist those forces.
(This text may sound a little vague because it is, I was going to be more specific and detailed, I even composed a larger text, but then I realized it was going into complicated realms (e.g. current geopolitics, lots of personal anecdotes making my whole comment sound as if I were narcissistic) so I refrained from going into further detail)