Nah, the internet has always sucked it just has gotten worse

The normies are fine, the problem is that capitalists consolidated everything into 4 websites and then started pushing the unprofitable weirdos like us off those sites.

It’s not a big deal, we’ve made niches for ourselves and will continue to do so because we can’t rely on corporate services not to enshittify.

Normies ruined the internet

I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the Cyptocurrency freaks, the click bait video game ads, and the endless AI generated slop.

What was this about my dear sweet mother, who can barely check her email anymore because of all this crap, ruining the Internet?

I think the expression is the capitalists will sell you the rope with which you’ll hang them.

So long as you’re planning to hang them next quarter – they can’t see that far.

How much?

As long as we’re blaming something instead of coming up with a new system of distributing goods and services.

I think a problem is that different people have different meanings attached to the word capitalism

when some people hear it they think of trillionares exploiting homeless people, but when I hear it I think of private property and markets and competition

Im chill with the 2ed meaning, as long as it doesnt get out of control (like nowadays)

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Britain ruined North America (ask the many natives of colonial times) before America could ruin the rest of the continent, then itself

I agree … but we should develop the federated social media in whatever way we can, however it turns out or looks like or even operates … as long as we’re using it, it’s a good thing.

As long as corporate control is kept at bay and away from federated social media, we’ll be OK.

If any corner of the federated social media starts to get infected with corporate control, then that disease will just grow and consume the whole system … just like every other thing it destroyed before.

And because we aren’t chasing profit, mass adoption, or clout here, we can get increasingly local and granular with our instances, and increasingly rigorous about who we let in. Since what we’re chasing is real community, we have nothing to sell out for. And even if some instances do flip over to corpos, we can just defederate and welcome the inevitable influx of departing users.

The thing you really have to look out for in the future is “premium” instances or forks of Lemmy which are paywalled, and eventually locked down to a single instance. It just becomes the next Twitter. It’s unlikely, but something to be wary of once the rest of the open internet is picked clean.

Shame that capital is without a doubt mining our genuine public communications for their wage depressing plagiarism machines, because it’s not like you can get that from the old place anymore.

obscure enough to barely be targeted by bots

Nicole is a trailblazer.

modern internet culture of rage-bait, walling ourselves into our echo chambers, and occasionally seeing heavy-handed moderation.

I was around for usenet and those have all always been a thing. That’s just how people are. They just don’t call it “flaming” any more.

I’ll take forum lords ruling too strictly over their little fiefdoms over the kind of stuff that happens on large platforms wrt moderation.

We need to bring back meta-moderation, kind of like Slashdot had.

…it’s obscure enough to barely be targeted by bots (so far).

This is what concerns me. If the fediverse ever catches on to the point where it’s worth it for bad actors to be running bots, not only will instances have to restrict signups, but also defederate from those that don’t (kinda like how beehaw does it).

Right, so it existed in the latter half of the decade, not in a span of time covering the whole middle.

If the “mid-2000s” were to cover, say, the four years 2003-2006, YouTube would have existed for half of that - not 2003 or 2004, but 2005 and 2006.

And it beat television, because funny videos could swear freely, or use any song as a gag, without it being a big deal.

God dammit.

A map in your browser with full scrolling and zooming may have been impressive back then, it’s true. But you know what’s impressive today?

$ telnet mapscii.me

A map in your terminal with full scrolling and zooming. 😎

That time period was after everything was monetized and full of ads though.

Search engines were garbage. Yahoo actually provided a decent competition to search engines by paying humans to manually maintain an index, and review user submissions on whether to add a new site to the index.

If the web today didn’t consist of “5 websites each with screenshots from the other 4”, that could be even more competitive now when search engines have figured out how to monetize bullshit.

Email servers only held mail for just long enough for you to download your copy, and then would delete from the server. If you wanted to read an archived email, you had to go back to the specific computer you downloaded it to, because you couldn’t just log into the email service from somewhere else. This was a pain when you used computer labs in your university (because very few of us had laptops).

That’s a feature of the POP3 protocol, not mandatory, though usually used. Now people usually use IMAP and web frontends, and sometimes Exchange.

That was the normal way, yes, because disk space is not endless.

User interactions with websites were clunky. Almost everything that a user submitted to a site required an actual HTTP POST transaction, and a reloading of the entire page.

Maybe that’s how it should have been still.

Everything was insecure. Encryption was rare, and even if present was usually quite weak. Security was an afterthought, and lots of people broke their computers downloading or running the wrong thing.

That’s a fact. Well, at the same time popular knowledge that nothing is secure leads, paradoxically, to more security. People knowing everything they say is unprotected will be more responsible. That’s one thing that has sort of become better technically, but worse socially.

Nope, I think 2005-2015 was the golden age of the internet. Late enough to where the tech started to support easy, democratized use, but early enough that the corporations didn’t ruin everything.

I think I agree, except more like 2004-2011 for me.

Well my point was more that there’s a bit of a rose-tint in this person’s description of the “early internet”… unless they mean really early, like ARPANET early.

Plenty of rage-bait attention seeking in the mid-2000s.

Domino image with “Lowtax bans anime from General Bullshit” on one end and “American fascism” at the other.

it was far from “human and genuine”.

Are racist rants and worse not “human and genuine?”

Most humans are too slow, ignorant, passive and apathetic to join in important discussions.

Hey, that’s not…ehh, whatever.

Wasn’t Ask Jeeves the best search engine?

If you had a seizure condition, though…

Oh, yeah, the browser wars. As a designer during that time, having to learn 5 or more versions of css and JavaScript (which were sometimes competing and broke one another) before code pages were a thing was a nightmare.

And getting kicked off dial-up because someone decided to make a phone call when a large game download was at 97% complete after 5 hours before file caching was really a thing was infuriating.

You didn’t have to be looking for porn – it was super common to run across CP or beheading videos in random niche interest forums posted by trolls. So many times I saw something I did not want to see when clicking for a knitting pattern.

e: I have psychological scars from that Dan Pearl video – for a while in the mid-aughts, it was literally unavoidable unless you stopped using the internet entirely.