An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…
Forums, the fediverse, your own website, and perhaps most controversially of all, outside.
Forums as a response to leaving Reddit feels odd to me despite subreddits basically being forums. I guess without a way to aggregate separate forums into one app it loses the appeal that Reddit had for me.
Here’s hoping lemmy takes off.
Yeah, that’s the killer. Reddit was great because I could join a hundred communities and see all of them in one place. Sounds like we need a common forum aggregator of some sort.
Or Lemmy. Liking it so far.
Same. Only thing I’m missing so far is some of my favorite communities like r/onepunchman
I used to rely on it for notification of English translations of new chapters
And the upvoting allowed good stuff from any topic to percolate up. I don’t know too much but the barriers between instances may mean some good content from lesser sources may not be seen or the supporters remain fragmented.
It has been a lot of indoors time here in Ontario thanks to wildfire smog!
Well could y’all keep it in ontario because we’ve been getting your smog down in Minnesota now too.
Joking of course. Stay safe up there.
Outside was the first place to be enshittified. I crave third-place, but it hasn’t really existed for decades.
I just finished the Behind the Bastards podcast on Vagrancy. the destruction of the third place and destroying the ability to be anywhere for free without being hassled by the law has changed a part of America that was great. The freedom to exist is becoming elusive. The freedom to find common space with like minded people, that’s becoming hard to find too. I hope this place helps.
