When I was growing up the internet was a place to be liberated from the world say what you want to say, be whoever you want and form genuine communities with shared interests. Now the internet feels like a tool to enslave the mind with identity echo chambers and any deviation leads you to being banned and blocked shunned and silenced within a void that is inescapable. Novel unique websites coded manually by hobbyists running servers for free in the commons allowing people access to the free flow of information under the banner of “information should be free” has largely gone away with corpratisation. I miss the days when the internet was populated largely by nerds aiming to make a better world not this controlled censored hell hole of profiteering.
I agree and now I find myself moving my entire digital life off of big tech platforms and towards free software to escape this madness.
The good old internet still exists and lemmy is living proof. You just need to dig a little because the corporate search engines won’t show you. sdf.org for example is a nice little corner of the internet.
As long as the internet remains open, even if it’s in our own private corner, then we’ll always have a place to go, even if the place changes. If Google’s “internet DRM” ever becomes a thing, we’re completely fucked.
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Same here, I’ve become extremely disillusioned by how dystopian big tech has become. It’s a nice change of pace to use platforms like Lemmy or Mastodon where it’s just every day people running instances rather than a place for big tech to collect and profit off your data