this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
390 points (95.1% liked)

Ask Lemmy

32675 readers
1934 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.

It's a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I've noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.

I've known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I'm back in the early spirit of the internet.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 17 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Not the only one, but it's the walled garden platform approach.

The idea (from around 2010ish) was that every platform is an app and every app is everything. A company buys up other smaller companies until you have a payment system, a marketplace, a VOIP system, advertising, job posting boards, 4 different waya to share media, etc. etc.

While the tech world sold this as, and actually viewed this as, some organic online super village, it wasn't. It was a series of shit stripmalls adjacent to a Walmart in a shitberg town on a big freeway linking other shiberg towns with Walmarts. Sterile, restrictive, one size fits all dipshits kind of garbage. There's a kind of person that thrives in the parking lots of Walmarts and stripmalls in shitberg towns, and they thrive on social media, too.

Lemmy reminds me more of early internet as well, but also refined by the common language of those platforms as a common starting point. It's a niche, and it's not for everyone. But it is for you, welcome.

[–] brem@lemmy.world 7 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

There's a kind of person that thrives in the parking lots of Walmarts and stripmalls in shitberg towns, and they thrive on social media, too.

Well put. I'm old school Tripod days (if anyone remembers what that was). I've seen social media go from "A/S/L?" to "like & subscribe" and everything in between. It was never that clean, and the lot lizards were always lurking.

[–] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

The idea (from around 2010ish) was that every platform is an app and every app is everything. A company buys up other smaller companies until you have a payment system, a marketplace, a VOIP system, advertising, job posting boards, 4 different waya to share media, etc. etc.

You're describing AOL. This is nothing new. And just as AOL failed and faded, so will the social media giants.

[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 1 points 6 hours ago

I understand what you're saying, but AOL had the opposite problem. The internet at that time was hard to use in general, so it was more about trying to provide enough of anything to get commercial viability for regular people. At one point, AOL was 30% of the entire internet. Seriously, it hosted almost a third of everything online. The alternatives were CompuServe or Prodigy or simply not being online at all. But you paid for it up front as an ISP. AOL didn't provide anything for free up front.

The Web 2.0 walled garden approach is about preventing you from wandering out onto the wide open spaces of the rest of the internet out there and not seeing the content curated to make the platform provider money. And making the 10% of daily internet content composed of idiotic FB comments and posts seem like it's worth all your time when you can easily use one of 5 or 6 search engines to find alternative content. Making staying in the garden so cost effective and frictionless that even using a search engine seems "hard" to do.