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Daniel Lakeland @dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
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
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026
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I don't regret it. I only regret letting the corporations stake their claim without greater pushback.
Yep. That is the regret.
When Facebook came around, I immediately saw what it would lead to. Hell, just the thought of sharing your personal details for anyone and everyone to read was extremely creepy to me. Any time I tried to communicate this to people asking me why I wasn't on Facebook it achieved nothing. Pushback was useless, people want what they perceive as "convenience" even when they have to (almost literally) sell their souls to the machine. No, I don't think pushback would have helped, because people want these - and I shudder to call them such - services. The Internet was doomed the day it became mainstream.
When I was young, I was called a nerd for using computers. People online were primarily nerds who cared about tech. Those days are long gone, and there was nothing that could've been done to prevent the rot. It was inevitable as the Internet became more popular.
The masses will always be asses. They don't care. They will eat corporate slop and ask for seconds until their bloated corpses burst. The best we can do is create alternative infrastructures and wait with horror as they start to rot too.
Jesus, I think I'm having a bit of a blue day.
The slow creep was real. Social media corporations brought the mainstream to the internet in the worst possible way, but the old internet was still alive in forums and chats and discussion groups that had been around for years.
Reddit destroyed it. It gathered everyone into one place. It was constantly growing and pulled users from everywhere else in the internet to one place. Centralization. Then, it inevitably went corpo to the point that the greed of the ones on top destroyed the communities they gathered and exploited to put themselves in their elevated positions of wealth.
To be clear, the people with the money don’t care at all. They cashed out and got theirs. Everything burns around their greed, no different from oil companies.
The internet was supposed to connect everyone, share ideas, connect the world to collective knowledge, and bring us all together. Instead, it became a tool of corporatist and fascist control. Reddit ultimately ended up being the corpo that crushed and scattered the opposition.
Eloquently said.
A decent chunk of local businesses don’t have a web presence besides Meta products. Meta would love to be “the internet”, they had a project in early 2010’s to give free “internet” in developing countries. The catch, the internet received was restricted to Facebook. It was called out by net neutrality advocates as being very anticompetitive and India rejected the project in 2016. Even a decade ago the zucc had been using underhanded tactics to put as many eyes on his propaganda machines.
Why should some jackass amass as much wealth as a nation state by siphoning pennies from every other interaction on the planet?
Link to BBC article about India rejecting free internet below.
India blocks Zuckerberg's free net app Published
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35522899
Surprised there are no video essays on how reddit destoryed the internet
“The best time to join the fediverse is 10 years ago, second best time is today.”