Fediverse, the social media system for 40+ year old people who built the world wide web and regret it.

[amiserabilist@beige.party]

@publicwondering @douglasvb @dlakelan

[douglasvb@m.ai6yr.org]

@w_b @60sRefugee @dlakelan I dunno. Pretty sure letters to the editor and personal ads in the local newspaper were the OG social media.

[chris_colvin@mastodon.social]

@dlakelan I’m only 34, but can I come along?

[the_moep@mastodon.de]

@dlakelan At the risk of repeating others or taking it too serious:

This ignores a significant amount of people actually building and using this thing.

[nathanking@mastodon.social]

@dlakelan Pepperidge Farm remembers when the web was for sharing useful information and had no corporations or ads. Pepperidge Farm is now owned by Campbell's.

[nux@fosstodon.org]

@dlakelan Nailed it!

[alienghic@timeloop.cafe]

@dlakelan

I've seen people under 30 here!

They may all be corporate hating anarchists though.

[randomgeek@masto.hackers.town]

@dlakelan @d_rift to be fair I don’t regret building the web. I regret building all its parasitic industries that promised to be symbiotic.

[pteryx@dice.camp]

@aoanla @iakobsdesamos @douglasvb @dlakelan
I'm starting to suspect that the vast majority of people *didn't notice* that for about a decade and a half there, the Net was a public space primarily about things that *weren't* corporate.

(Before that it was more restricted-access, after that it had been captured.)

[d_rift@beige.party]

@randomgeek @dlakelan in an SF accent, "trust us bro" rhymes with "symbiot", so I guess the con was there all along, but. Yeah, same.

[douglasvb@m.ai6yr.org]

@pteryx @aoanla @iakobsdesamos @dlakelan wasn't that an amazing time for humanity?

[pteryx@dice.camp]

@douglasvb @aoanla @iakobsdesamos @dlakelan
It was! And it allowed me to actually make friends for once, too!

[rothko@beige.party]

@douglasvb @dlakelan YES

[douglasvb@m.ai6yr.org]

@pteryx @aoanla @iakobsdesamos @dlakelan same!!!

I am STILL friends with people I met online in the early days of the Internet and I've met about 75% of them in person at least once!

[rothko@beige.party]

@MaryAustinBooks @iakobsdesamos @douglasvb @dlakelan man, i miss livejournal.

[pteryx@dice.camp]

@rothko @MaryAustinBooks @iakobsdesamos @douglasvb @dlakelan
At the very least, Dreamwidth exists. Fork from back when LJ started showing signs of going bad.

[bosak@flx.masto.host]

@dlakelan I think we're all here.

[douglasvb@m.ai6yr.org]

@pteryx @rothko @MaryAustinBooks @iakobsdesamos @dlakelan I met so many good people on ElJay. It was a tragedy when it went bad and then got sold to Russia.

Remember dead journal? A few friends went over there for a while. What ever happened to that platform?

[pteryx@dice.camp]

@fluffykittycat @MamaLake @dlakelan
It's hard to "pay attention" to what's been claimed by link rot, pulled behind paywalls or login-walls, moved to Discord for a false sense of "safety", deleted out of fear of being scraped by "AI" crawlers, DDoSed by "AI" scrapers, downranked by search engines (yes, I know about Marginalia Search), and/or buried in piles of SEO slop counterfeit pages.

It used to be trivial to *find new non-corporate webpages*.

[ozdreaming@infosec.exchange]

@aleksimanninen @douglasvb @MaryAustinBooks @iakobsdesamos @dlakelan Marginalia Search is cool! One of its paradoxes is that it appears to respect sites that reject crawlers and bots (ex: jwz.org) -- so many traditional websites that are still actively maintained may be opaque to it, as their admins try to stem the bot onslaught.