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100% agree. I think we were better off with the Wild West. Users were actually in charge, server admins were small operators who didn’t have to answer to venture capitalists who wanted to 10x their investment, not everything was data scraped and logged to build advertising profiles on the entire population. Each community set its own rules, you didn’t have one guy in California deciding what the AUP would be for millions and then changing it on a whim because some advertiser got pissed off.
While the big companies have created some very cool stuff, and using it is very approachable without any technical knowledge, I would trade it all in to go back to the situation where not everything is hosted on some megaplatform. I think it’s better for the internet that way.
I like to think that sort of movement is making a resurgence, I’m seeing more people involved in self-hosting stuff, and with recent changes at Reddit and Twitter there’s a lot more interest in decentralized communication platforms.
I also think the platform is the key. I don’t think any one person or group should be in charge of the public square. Not Spez not Elon and certainly not Tencent or anyone connected with an authoritarian government.
Yeah those were good times posting trolls on a site made by some dude who was a carpenter running the site in his spare time. Site had only one rule: don’t be an asshole, which would only get enforced when that one dude got home from work.
Though I’m not sure that’s all that feasible now, too many idiots on the internet Poe’s law and all that. We can’t be all that wild anymore because there’s idiots that take this shit too seriously now.
But I think the Fediverse is an interesting middle ground. I can foresee racist whack jobs setting up some instances resulting in a weird broken web of sites that are sometimes federated, sometimes not. Maybe we can organize troll raids on the bad guy sites and shit like that.
It could be wild times, but I think it’ll be a different kind of wild than before.
the answer to that is somewhat larger moderation teams, like 6-8 people in their spare time, ideally not in the same timezone. hundreds of thousands, if not millions of said teams have self-organized in the past couple of years with all the corpo platforms going full “user-generated content” on moderation as well, in an effort to scale their empires, and now they’re questioning just how necessary those corpos are.
Yet TikTok is still vastly more popular then lemmy or reddit.
So what?
There’s a place for that. Back in the old IRC days there was a place for AOL. Let TikTok and Reddit keep the idiots.