Mastodon toot:

Daniel Lakeland @[email protected]

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

  • Chloé 🥕@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    111·
    14 days ago

    there’s 2 kinds of people on fedi:

    40 year olds who remember the good ol days of the interwebs

    16 year old queer shitposters who got tired of getting called every slur imaginable on other networks

    both are into linux

      • holy_scroller@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        14 days ago

        Luckily it is typically too small to be much of a bot target. I don’t subscribe to world news subs though, dark places.

        • peopleproblems@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          14 days ago

          It’s usually only the news subs. But if you make claims that counter Kremlin propaganda you can sometimes summon them.

          Like if I just say Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine, it won’t (why? Beats me). But if I say they are killing ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens as well as Ukrainian men, women, and children, then we have a good chance.

          I got others if it doesn’t work.

          Edit: (WITNESS ME! Lol) Edit 2: Now I’m impressed. I knew I could do it, I didn’t expect it to work quite so well. I’ll check back in a few hours.

    • Gyrcas@piefed.zipEnglish
      3·
      14 days ago

      Queer less than 25 here, I came here not because I was getting called slurs but because I’m tired of companies and of AI, I’m also on Linux :3

      • Hanrahan@slrpnk.netEnglish
        2·
        13 days ago

        I’m 60 and was tired of companies before you were born, AI is just the same shit served on a different cracker, I’m also on Linux :)

    • kuerbiskernoel@feddit.orgEnglish
      2·
      14 days ago

      Third kind (the only people I know from real life who use the fediverse): Tech/math enthusiasts, usually grad students (who are also into linux)

    • djdarren@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      14 days ago

      I have to use Windows at work now, which is ass.

      Anyway, I had a question about how to achieve something in Powershell the other day, so I asked it on Mastodon. Got basically nothing in response.

      Every time I ask how to do something in Linux I get swamped with responses.

      Make of that what you will.

    • FistingEnthusiast@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      14 days ago

      I’m a Luddite who discovered this shit inadvertently, and still doesn’t actually understand how any of it works

      But you’re correct in that I’m pushing 50

    • S_H_K@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      14 days ago

      I can be a 40 years old queer friendly tired of being called slurs wanting to go back, with a mindset of a 16 year old…

  • Doom@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    14 days ago

    Fuck that. I don’t regret it. We built the world wide web from nothing for everyone and had it fucking stolen by rich assholes who put our community resources WE developed behind ads and paywalls. Unlike those uncreative hacks we have the talent to take it back.

    • UninvestedCuriosity@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      13 days ago

      /fistclench

      We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good,
    • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      13 days ago

      The WWW was built for everyone.

      We let rich assholes steal it out of laziness.

      Take for example, Facebook vs MySpace or similar. Making a Facebook is instant, making a MySpace took effort. Setting up a subreddit is instant and free and gets you an immediate registered audience, setting up a vBulletin or similar forum is time-consuming and costs money and getting any traffic is an uphill battle. Same thing with posting- on Reddit just mozy on over to that sub and hit post, on a forum you have to register. Or you want to make videos? Gotta pay for a decent web hosting plan, lots of bandwidth, and deal with encoding, playback scripts, etc. Or just make a YouTube and hit ‘upload’.

      So we let big platforms take over the Internet. We gained a fuckton of features and convenience. We didn’t consider what we lost- creativity, and the independence of not having to make everything advertiser-friendly.

      Monetization is the other frenemy. It’s great that creators can get paid for their work easily. But what we lose with that is every creator pandering to the algorithm, every video begs ‘like comment and subscribe!’, videos shy away from advertiser-unfriendly topics, and the kid filter brainrot is starting to infect common lexicon (‘my brother got caught watching corn and now he’s gonna unalive himself with a pewpew’ type nonsense).

      For that reason I think decentralization and federation are the way out.

      Look at forums for example- one of the biggest barriers to entry was registration, getting people to care enough to bother registering. Lemmy fixes that, and you can still make a community as closed and private as you want.

      I’m hoping a new group of websites will spring up from this. My only fear is they will all drown in a sea of AI slop.

  • lordziv@lemmy.nzEnglish
    2·
    14 days ago

    I personally blame the iPhone. Shit all started going downhill from then

    • GrindingGears@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      13 days ago

      Nope. You got the time period right, but I would like to posit it’s when they started letting our Parents, drunk uncles and dumb ass aunties on Facebook.

      The problem always has, and always will be, Facebook.

      • combomeal@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        13 days ago

        I completely agree. Should have never taught the geriatric community how to access FB

        • cloudshouter@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          13 days ago

          Honestly someone should have just whooped Zucks ass and shut down Facebook entirely. It’s whole original premise was scummy and if only got worse. There was data at the time showing how bad it was. The roll out to various colleges was happening at the same time as a nationwide student health and wellness survey. Mental health dropped significantly whenever access was opened to a college.

      • lordziv@lemmy.nzEnglish
        0·
        13 days ago

        But what made it more accessible and easy to access places like Facebook in the first place? Smart phones.

        • GrindingGears@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          12 days ago

          Smartphones weren’t really all that popular until 2007, and none of the ones before the iPhone 3G or like the Blackberry’s could really run Facebook all that well. The iPhone never really blew up to the level it’s at now until the 4 arguably, which didn’t come out until 2010 or 2011 (think it was 2010). Facebook had already been pretty infected before then.

  • Zedstrian@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    2·
    13 days ago

    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, training an LLM with my data, 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.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      14 days ago

      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.

      • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        14 days ago

        Equal access for all is still better than one company controlling access to my content for the purposes of monetization.

  • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    14 days ago

    I would say I like it here, imo the format and overall technology is perfect. I am always impressed by how little battery and data voyager uses compared to all the other bloated apps on my phone.

    Having said that, I am disappointed that even without feeds and algorithms, it has become a lot more rage inducing and depressing then I would have hoped for.

    There is just so many things that affect my life in a negative way being shown here, can’t a guy get a little ignorant bliss about nerdy topics? Or long, deep discussions comparing the philosophies of niche hobbies?

    • squirrel@cake.kobel.fyiEnglish
      1·
      14 days ago

      I learned the first bits of HTML by editing an index.html file from an AOL disk and customizing it to be my own homepage. We didn’t even had home internet back then. So yeah, it counts.

  • zemo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    14 days ago

    Not quite. I went here initially because I got permabanned on reddit. But I now realize reddit is a shithole so I like it here. I do wish there were more active niche communities and I really wish you could comment while on VPN, which you cant for some reason

    • zarkanian@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      14 days ago

      Why can’t you comment while on a VPN? I’m on a VPN right now and I’m commenting.

      Also, I hate to tell you this, but reddit is the way it is because it’s so popular. If we had the amount of people necessary to make niche communities thrive, it would be just like reddit. Well, at least as far as the people posting and so on. There wouldn’t be any of the weird administrative stuff because it’s run much differently. But the fact that the system is just like reddit’s means that it attracts the same kinds of people and encourages the same kind of behavior.

    • mrmacduggan@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      14 days ago

      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