Honestly I just jumped to Lemmy after dndmemes sent me this way and it feels like I’m delving into early internet forums back in the day, fresh and new and full of excitement for the future
I know exactly what you mean. Fresh optimism. For fun, not for money or algorithms.
Fresh optimism for the communities and the new apps all being furiously worked on right now. I’ve got Memmy, Mlem, and Voyager all installed currently and watching the rapid development of each is a hell of a lot more interesting than the one Reddit app that’s been dogshit since they bought it and stuffed it full of ads and is only getting worse.
I have like 5 android apps installed waiting until I’m reunited with my beloved !syncforlemmy@lemmy.world
I should just probably try them all but do you have a preferred one so far? Currently using Memmy but honestly I finally dove back into something like this after a proper year without Reddit, to see how this community is doing and to see what the vibe is like.
Remember when forums would let you put unsanitized HTML in your signature and people exploited it to flood them with pop ups and redirects? Lemmy’s bringing that back, too!
Came for the decentralization, stayed for the nonconsensual lemon party redirects.
This is a Good Joke
Lemmy DID support HTML and iframes sometime ago. The devs scrapped it for security reasons and I hear they are planning to bring it back in future after making sure it is secure enough to use.
I was on a forum looking for something once and someone had a flash game as their sig. It was like Portal The Flash Version but the gun was on a rail. And the dimensions of the flash viewport were like a typical sig, so it was pretty interesting just to play a game in such a strange aspect ratio. Not really relevant to anything but I haven’t thought of that in a really long time.
put an old man face on that kid and you’ve nailed it
I think fediverse users are on average much older than other social medias. I often see polls on mastodon and the most prominent groups are very often the 35-45 year olds. I feel like im in the minority of my age (19) caring about free software and it makes me sad that nowadays tech has to be so dumbed down because even the young can’t use computers just like my grand parents. It’s crazy how my classes most people only knew how to open instagram, but they had no clue how to save a word document
You might be right. I’m new here but so far I’m amused and surprised by the amount of ‘classic’ memes going around.
I think for many of us in the mid 30s early 40s it boils down to having experienced a version of the Internet where content was king, not personality. Anyone could get their website out there but it was what you put in it that mattered, not who put it there (unless you were an actual celebrity). You could bump into all sorts of new information just by clicking from link to link. Then we saw and experienced first hand the rise of the search algorithms, the echo chambers, click bait and the cult to fluff that social media became pretty much since the beginning.
The Internet we have now is certainly shinnier but only the way plastic is. When I look at the information being churned out and that gets passed around more often I can only think about it in terms of pollution. The equivalent of styrofoam pellets being manufactured for single immediate use that cover the information sphere and that just end up making people’s life worse in the long term. Twitter, Meta and the like (none holds a candle to TikTok though) are no different from the factories that have been spilling poison down the drain for decades. The latter pollute our physical space, the first pollute our emotional an mental environments.
I honestly don’t think I’m being a grumpy old fart (though I am). This is the reason I preferred reddit a while ago and why I now came here. It sort of feels like those days when ‘browsing’ was about stepping out of your own world experience and into completely different ones.
End of rant. Thanks if you made it here. :)
Honestly, I think we have better content nowadays, but said content is harder and harder to find. At the same time, said content probably gets more and more viewership as well.
I feel like if I was born in the 90s, I would’ve killed to have content like Kurtzgesagt or LinusTechTips or Wendover or NileRed or Adam Ragusea etc etc. Although you had your Bill Nyes and Mythbusters and whatnot, there couldn’t have been a way to make high-quality content without the resources and reach that a platform like YouTube offers today.
Yes Geocities web rings with rotating skulls was the content king!
Or maybe people rapping in AOL chat rooms
Sure, yeah trash is trash. If that’s how far you wanted to go you’d have plenty of it. But the web didn’t necessarily trend towards it. Plenty of other spaces where to go. Later, in the mid-late 2000s marketing saw how eagerly people swallowed trash and so the race to the bottom took speed. Most of the web today is aimed at the lowest common denominator. The rotating skullz are but the grand-daddies of the Tiks and the Toks IMO.
Totally, many early forums and bulletin board systems had good discussion, it wasn’t all trash at all! But, there was also a lot of trash. The internet has always been a weird mix of wonderful information and genuine useful tools, and a blazing dumpster fire of shit, on fire.
You’re not alone. Most people I know don’t even sort their files into directories anymore, they just search for it (particularly in cloud storages like Google Drive).
In fact, when I took the introductory computer engineering course at my HS, the teacher made everyone sort their Google Drive files as an assignment.
Same, my first semester we had a course litterally about creating word and excel documents, how to format text etc… in a software engineering program. Or other example, (2nd year, 2nd semester of the year on a 3 year program) last semester, we had a semester team project that we had to give at the end. At first, I litterally had tell them how to commit changes to the github repo, because they only did it though the web UI. How they got this far into the program I honestly have no clue as we litterally had a course in the first year that had a few classes dedicated for proper git usage
What the fuck is wrong with people, first cutlery just being flung in a drawer any which way, now apparently files just go wherever it’s all a cloud or whatever anyway isn’t it
I just found out that people use search on thier computers to find files and have no idea where anything is located. It hurts just thinking about it.
And paradoxically they refuse to use search engines to find anything on the Internet.
I completely lost control of my folder structure after keeping all my old backups (before i had a network storage) on HDDs and later copying them over as Backup-Pc-X, Backup-Pc-Y, etc. I should clean up since years. But hey, so far the search worked :D
That I can understand. I have a folder on desktop I dump everything into that’s loose to sweep under the rug. Desktop23. Desktop22, etc. And these folders go back years on my external drive. They will not be organized ever.
But I have the feeling you understand where things are supposed to go. The people I’m talking about have zero idea what’s in thier computer.
I have been ill this year and as I am pretty limited in what I can do, I am finally sorting stuff properly. It is just that I usually don’t delete anything. Every time I change a device I dump stuff based on file type on folders either on cloud, device or external HDD thinking I will come back to it. Instead, I never come back. And because of my work, a bunch of stuff is pretty depressive so sorting a decade of files and images I would want to forget feels impossible. But I am making a dent.
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I think there are a lot of computer illiterate people I most generations but there seems to be an overlap of late gen x/early millennial thst kind of had to learn how computers and the internet worked if they wanted to use them as tech wasn’t as easy to use. Plus anyone older than that who used computers where more often considered nerds.
These days more and more people don’t even have a computer and just do everything through their phones.
theres older people that are like that too though. they just want to be able to use a pc, etc. and not have to think about it too much.
My reaction to this post
omg its the same kid! its him hes a skateboarding netrunner now
Hard to believe our hover-keyboards used to have wires!
I was told it was weird to use the phrase “surfing the web” the other day. I am not even that old.
It beats doomscrolling. Surfs up, dude! 🤟
??? I’m Gen Z and I use it sometimes, weird according to who?
After Gen Z, do we start over with Gen A?
I’m going online for a bit
Don’t forget your dual-wheel, 4D+ mouse!
Ngl this probably would make it easier to scroll websites without fixed widths, as well as diagrams.
I would play minecraft with that
I wonder if this works under Microsoft ® Windows ®
Two eyes … Two scroll wheels
Makes sense to me
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Yep, I’m here for good too. Reddit will never get that magic back that it once had.
There is more variety of content here IMO. I like seeing more international posts even if i dont aleays understand the language or the context.
Back there it was all ragey clickbait bot karma removed.
I feel like it’s not dominated by the same sort of content, but a lot of smaller communities and niche interests (at least the ones I’m interested in) have yet to develop on lemmy.
I’ve got a healthy sub list going, and am actually participating again instead of lurking. Ive got my default set to Alll-New so i come across some great things randomly. The other day some guy posted in ancient coins a greek coin that was about the size of your pinkey nail. Much more refreshing than some rehashed tweet by some asshole.
This place is awesome. I like that I can recognize usernames in replies. It definitely feels closer than reddit.
Amen to that. Maybe 5 years here if we’re lucky and then on to blemmy.
I dunno this feels pretty reddit to me
This site feels like reddit from ~2010. IE back before all the monetization and add bullshit.
Yeah I’m digging it…
I’m amazed it doesn’t feel like 4chan in 2005. Like, how is it possible that it’s not full of spam and racism? I hope it stays that way.
Shhhh they’ll hear you.
Really though, defederation is the reason why.
Can you explain why that makes a difference?
Instance owners can have full control over who they federate with. From the start, the mainstream in the Fediverse has had a tolerant, open-minded and positive mindset. Over time instances that don’t follow this (e.g. by promoting hate speech) are defederated, leaving mostly decent discourse. Users that try to join instances that follows the Fediverse ethics while not belonging, and try to spread hate, get banned.
We’re still in early days but this will keep happening until the verse is wide and large, and you can choose your own little corner that aligns with what you want, whether that’s more like what we have today, or the opposite end of the spectrum, but for now we get to enjoy to still have mostly only tolerant instances, and the nasty ones are defederated into oblivion.
I have the urge to give you gold, but you know…
Try looking at your comment through this link.
What is this sorcery
omfg
even less reason to go back now…
Just shows how unimportant the company behind the interface is, they’re just letting users create all the community and content and use their IP to take all the money, but the platform itself is of little value these days, when some random dude can create the exact same thing from his attic in an afternoon.
I’m glad he did it because it helped push me out the door.
That was a trip. As simple as the UI is it somehow never occurred to me it could be copied.
I used their original spritesheet when I redesigned the css for r/unresolvedmysteries.
I love it. Less content = less addictive scrolling. Deleted reddit the moment lemmy finally let me make an account (on the 10th try or so).
Hold on to your butts - we’re gonna surf the web
If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 Kb/s, you’re gonna see some serious shit!
If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 56Kb/s, you’re gonna see some serious shit!
FTFY
Bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbdudududududueeeeperrrrrrpeeeeeeeeeeeeeeuhhhhhheeeeeeeeeg shhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch brrrrrr
Ngl I’m as high as these kids.
Velcro shoes were the best
Old people got em too!
They still make them, or at least they did when I got shoes last a couple years ago.
This picture makes me nostalgic for an era I barely remember being alive for.
sorry if i made anyone feel oldAm 65. Old. But don’t feel it. No need to apologize.
I love you guys. Lemmy is seriously the most fun I’ve had online in a long while. Also loving the serious posts and comments.
Nice to meet you, fellow explorers of cyberspace!
Does it really feel like the old web though? I’m a zoomie (22) and I kinda developed a rose tinted nostalgia for the old web (Windows 98 era) where I didn’t even live in (tbf apparently a lot of zoomers have some nostalgia obsession with some sort of era).
Veteran lads, can Lemmy capture the old web feeling?
Right now, because it’s still growing and developing, Lemmy has this sudo-wild west felling to it. Like anything can happen.
This was how things were in the early days of the internet. With no way to know how things are going to turn out, people are just hanging out. Smaller groups interacting with each other, and just having fun.
It feels like a reboot, or a modern revision of the how things were.
Pseudo make sandwich 😉
Ha! I read, and re-read my post at least 3 times and could not figure out why it felt wrong.
Too much bash and not enough books
As an old YTMND user, this is probably as close as it will ever get to what I experienced back then. I’d say have fun with this while you can, lol.
What’s YTMND?
I think people say it’s got a bit of an old school feeling to it more because it feels a little bit lawless, and new, and experimental - a wild-west with a user base still finding its feet and expanding and figuring out what this place is and what communities will form.
I’ve been kicking around the internet since the 90s so it’s quite a nice feeling, although not quite the same!
Yeah for one we didn’t have up-points on all our posts and comments, and even in more active BBSes, forums, or chat rooms, you rarely had as many people in one “place” at a time. Really your only method of interaction or “reacting” or registering approval/disapproval was through writing something of your own.
And nothing ever went viral, because no one but a bunch of nerds cared about what happened on the internet.
But they will never know what is like to be under the fear of a cold war and a nuclear attack…oh, wait, shit!
Mr. Putin, bring down this wall!!
Yes and no. It should be a niche forum covering competitive speed fisting but it’s a really bland version of internet 2.0
Partially. The main feeling of old is the greater sense of community, even if everyone is a named anonymous. People don’t have to fight for attention around here. If you want to see a better visual representation of mid 90’s internet, check neocities.org
Yeah I’ve already heard about that. I absolutely love those website designs. Each site beautifully represent the creator’s personality, which makes it fun exploring these sites.
The Internet felt like a brand spanking new wild West back in the 90s like there was so much to discover and explore. You don’t understand the novelty of having all the information at your fingertips immediately. What was that actor’s name in that movie that one time? What was the name of that song with those lyrics? Missed last week’s episode, used to just hope you can catch it on summer reruns, but with internet you could look up whatever you missed.
Lenny right now feels like a wal mart brand replacement for something you had a long time that just broke and you’re still trying to find a long term replacement. It’s got some of the features, a fraction of the content, a bunch of new words to learn, and a lot more bugs, so who knows. It’s just a message board at the end of the day so I’m not sure if it brings anything new to the table like 90’s internet did.
No, not even close. The web was pretty shit and — get this — nothing you ever did on it counted.
[cries in screeching modem sounds]
The UI is much nicer than way back in the day. It’s a hell of a lot faster, and there are way more people. But the feeling of posting something without having your data collected is bringing me back though.
Yeah that’s totally understandable. I just really love all the old web feeling recapturing neocities sites like these: https://exo.pet/, https://dokode.moe/, https://shishka.neocities.org/shishka/new
If I could find my Encarta Encyclopedia disks, I would look up where this image comes from!
Yes I am old.
I’m Mr. Fox and I’m here to say, click on the door if you want to play!
