Mastodon toot:
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
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Im sorry but I did not contribute to this in any meaningful way.
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People on here think too highly of themselves and the Fediverse. The overwhelming majority of people here don’t know the basics of programming and of the few that do, the vast majority of them don’t make any contributions. Even to those who do contribute, comparing themselves or the Fediverse WWW and the people who built it rather arrogant, no?
At the end of the day, the Fediverse would be better off going through a reality check. It’s a niche alternative to mainstream social media that trades content for privacy. The tech is neat and the idea behind it is noble, but that’s about it. It’s not going to revolutionize the internet any time soon.
Software developers are on Mastadon, though. Big time.
The Fediverse in general attracts a lot of tech people compared to elsewhere, but even then, they’re still a minority.
The internet itself was once a niche alternative to mainstream knowledge
The way I see it is, that we are all good or even experts at something. The internet is not only about programming alone. The frustration comes from people who 30 years ago spent time discussing and sharing all kinds of knowledge on websites, forums or wikis but now, large corporations charge money to present the same knowledge more conveniently, but not always in the right context
This includes programming, but also gardening, how to ferment cabbage, how to clean a smoking pipe, what to feed guinea pigs.
It is definitely doable, but will take many decades
I mean you’re technically right, it is possible in theory. However, do you actually think that will be the case? I personally don’t see it.
The WWW made vast amounts of information remotely accessible and easy to navigate. Likewise, social media made large scale remote and asynchronous social interaction possible. Even though both took decades to evolve into what they are today, they fundamentally transformed how people access information and connect with one another. That’s what makes them revolutionary.
The Fediverse isn’t exactly like that. It’s a neat piece of tech, but it doesn’t exactly solve a problem that couldn’t already be solved. You can already communicate with people remotely, build communities, publish content, and interact with people across different platforms. The main thing that the Fediverse is trying to sell people on is decentralization which comes with perks like extra privacy and control, but which is valuable hence why this place has a genuine userbase, but I don’t see it going beyond that.
As it stands now the Fediverse is just another platform competing in a sea of other platforms. The Fediverse is already around a decade old, and not much has changed during this time. It was niche a decade ago, and it’s still niche now. The spot that it carved in the ecosystem is that of social media alternative that caters to left wing politics and tech bros. Even if it becomes more mainstream, it’ll still be viewed as another form of social media rather than something entirely new and different. The Fediverse is most certainly not like the WWW.
Who are all these people comparing the WWW and social media as a concept to the significance of the fediverse? I’ve never seen it. Lots of people are excited about the concept of a decentralized reddit-like social media, but I’ve never seen anyone express what you described.
Feels like we’re getting annoyed at nothing here honestly.
Fuck that. I don’t regret it. We built the world wide web from nothing for everyone and had it fucking stolen by rich assholes who put our community resources WE developed behind ads and paywalls. Unlike those uncreative hacks we have the talent to take it back.
/fistclench
We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good,The WWW was built for everyone.
We let rich assholes steal it out of laziness.
Take for example, Facebook vs MySpace or similar. Making a Facebook is instant, making a MySpace took effort. Setting up a subreddit is instant and free and gets you an immediate registered audience, setting up a vBulletin or similar forum is time-consuming and costs money and getting any traffic is an uphill battle. Same thing with posting- on Reddit just mozy on over to that sub and hit post, on a forum you have to register. Or you want to make videos? Gotta pay for a decent web hosting plan, lots of bandwidth, and deal with encoding, playback scripts, etc. Or just make a YouTube and hit ‘upload’.
So we let big platforms take over the Internet. We gained a fuckton of features and convenience. We didn’t consider what we lost- creativity, and the independence of not having to make everything advertiser-friendly.
Monetization is the other frenemy. It’s great that creators can get paid for their work easily. But what we lose with that is every creator pandering to the algorithm, every video begs ‘like comment and subscribe!’, videos shy away from advertiser-unfriendly topics, and the kid filter brainrot is starting to infect common lexicon (‘my brother got caught watching corn and now he’s gonna unalive himself with a pewpew’ type nonsense).
For that reason I think decentralization and federation are the way out.
Look at forums for example- one of the biggest barriers to entry was registration, getting people to care enough to bother registering. Lemmy fixes that, and you can still make a community as closed and private as you want.
I’m hoping a new group of websites will spring up from this. My only fear is they will all drown in a sea of AI slop.
The bit we should regret is that we let the rich corporates steal it.
Never thought I would say we need to decentralize the Internet
Yeah… That shit with ICANN and Autistici kinda raises some red flags now though…
In our defense, corporations ruined the world wide web. It still has so much potential if they weren’t involved.
Corporations are made of people, and people more broadly let them gain power. That doesn’t seem like a defence, it’s just a description of our failure.
It’s been corporate the entire time. The rise of the www literally fueled a global economic bubble.
The bubble was because of speculative finance assholes ripping each other off by pointing at the thin vaneer of corporate windows built on the tools that were mostly developed by the military, universities, CERN and countless nerds’ computer rooms and garages.
Hell yeah, my geocities Nine Inch Nails fan site helped build the Internet
Will you join my webring?
Indeed. You were up above it.
But alas, now they are down in it
I had a geocities page all about skateboarding. I’d give you the url, but I neither remember it, nor doubt your phone is wide enough for a url that long
Lawyer: You can’t divorce your wife, just because she’s a bit odd.
Micky: I said, she’s fucking Goofy!
I would like to deny this, but I can’t.
The only thing I wish I could deny is the 40+ part
As a call center employee, the most inexplicably difficult part of my job is asking an older person to navigate to our website. When I give them the 9 letter address, it almost always results in a google search for them and the ordeal of having them try to pick out our website from the sponsored results brings joy to advertisers everywhere.
This exact mechanism is why so many get caught in scams.
for 40+ people who built the WWW then sold it to the enshitifiers, which they now regret
It was not sold. It was taken/stolen
well I feel seen
Mario teaches typing and the Oregon Trail on 5.2499" disks were just a dream.
Kings Quest 4 on like 8 disks I think?
5.25" you absolute philistine
There, I’ve fixed it.
Bitches don’t know about these significant digits
And 30+ year old people who enjoyed the good times while they lasted and are now nostalgic?
