It’s crazy to me to see so many people recommending these. I remember thinking ed2k was old when Kazaa and Morpheus came out.

I was looking at this page and it brought so much nostalgia. The days of viruses, “proggys” in Yahoo chat (I missed the AOL train), being a young teenage script kiddy on the Internet… That was the best time of the Internet for me. You could do and say anything and never felt like there was a panopticon watching you to slip up at any time.

Proton is a good fit, and skiff.com may fit the bill as well.

That said, if we start getting heavily astroturfed with bots and spam I’m going to be a little less zen about it.

The spammers aren’t here in custom full-force software_dev_lemmy_bots mode yet, but when they come, moderation tool development will increase in effort tenfold.

The nation states are already using their “play Guess The Bot and lose” games. It’s the ones who post often and with clear lines in the sand you need to worry about. Problem is, there is a sea of regular people just like that.

Lemmy needs to go through a fork or three before it becomes viable to the mainstream. Currently Lemmy users produce much less legitimate worthwhile information on far less subjects than reddit, and even Quora shudder thinking about it.

Granted, I’ve only been here for about a week before reddit disabled 3rd party apps. Maybe the first 3 years were the golden years. I’m only speaking as to the bot infestation I see currently.