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

[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.

[pteryx@dice.camp]

RE: https://dice.camp/@pteryx/117368247487117847

@joshisanonymous @dlakelan
That's part of it, but not all of it. Other parts are more active poisoning, or entropy outstripping the ability to rebuild.

[tasharoni@a2mi.social]

@dlakelan I cofounded an ISP in 1996. I am really sorry.

[a_minion@mastodon.social]

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @douglasvb @dlakelan

& stone tablets

[rothko@beige.party]

@douglasvb @pteryx @MaryAustinBooks @iakobsdesamos @dlakelan i dunno about deadjournal; i ported everything to dreamwidth before deleting my LJ. early adopter, 4-digit user number.... but yeah. russia was the last straw.

[ozdreaming@infosec.exchange]

@aleksimanninen @douglasvb @MaryAustinBooks @iakobsdesamos @dlakelan now this feels like a Dark Forest hypothesis (if not re: the Fermi paradox), where frontier model bots are the malign intelligences being avoided.

[pteryx@dice.camp]

@meraord @killick @dlakelan
I find light-color-on-dark-color easiest to read on a glowing screen. White-on-black is the take with the strongest contrast, but pale-color-on-black or white-on-very-dark-grey or pale-color-on-very-dark-contrasting-color also works. Didn't much care for pale grey background as a default before.

The shift to black-on-white as the default reads to me as part of the corporatization push, an attempt to make the Web look "respectable".

[thiar@mastodon.social]

@dlakelan How dare you call me out like that!

[az_1@mstdn.azshostedstuff.uk]

@dlakelan Lol I feel like an alien considering i'm 18 here