So where are we all supposed to go now?
www.theverge.com
Twitter’s dying, Reddit’s changing, everything else is entertainment – and there’s nowhere left to hang out.

An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…

  • btaf45@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    1 year ago

    I REALLY HOPE this is the push we need to move away from corporate-owned social media.

    We have actually regressed significantly on that and we could easily go back to before it existed. Before Reddit there was (and still is) a decentralized discussion network called Usenet. It was extremely well designed and has none of the design flaws that Fedverse has. All newsgroups were automatically merged across all instances. Your UI showed you only new comments and submissions, in the newsgroups that you subscribed to. You could mark a comment tree as killed, and then you wouldn’t see any new comments in that particular comment tree even while still subscribed to the newsgroup. You generally had your choice of moderated or unmoderated group for each topic, with tens of thousands of topics.

    The only reason people don’t use it anymore is because all the free servers disappeared. But now I see all these new free Fedverse servers, which is great, but how come no new free Usenet servers? They could be ad supported. I started using the internet in 1982 and Fedverse feels like a reinvention of the decentralization wheel, which a bunch of design flaws the original has already solved long ago. If there were free servers again, and perhaps a new mobile client, Usenet use would skyrocket as people personally experience how easy and seamless it is.