I grew up late to the early internet days as I am just about as old as google itself. However, even in my time I remember light saber mouse cursors, neo colored backgrounds, the stupid but adorable fairy animations all over myspace, and websites auto playing Queen songs. There was character that we put it as a community.

While I may not be the biggest fan of the flat design of the lemmy website and how clinical it all seems, the FOSS nature leads to so much customization with apps and so forth while the content y'all produce is absolutely magical. If I see an ad I know it's cause one of you have something unique to actually show off and it's not just bots pushing me to open my wallet. Thank you, you lovely bunch of adorable dufuses.

what is this website exactly? is it something new that was made in response to the Reddit API stuff? or has it already been around a while

I miss IRC!

Yeah, ever since I first arrived on kbin, I’ve felt like a breeze is passing through me. It took me a while to realize, but then it hit me: it’s because I’m not enraging Redditors every day by just opening my mouth.

It’s such a nice breath of fresh air that I really didn’t know I needed. But now, looking back, it’s so obvious things weren’t the way they should be. And here, in the fediverse, things feel like they are exactly how they should be! It’s so nice!

I posted a toot on Mastodon back in November during the whole Twitter fiasco saying how Mastodon in 2022 felt like Twitter did circa 2010. Same feeling for Lemmy / Kbin!

I'm not old enough to remember the early internet, but I do feel like there's been a shift in how I interact with the internet in the last 6 months or so. Prior to that, most of my interaction was sanitized through the channels laid out by large corporations: twitter, instagram, etc.

While I still use those platforms to an extent, it feels as if it's become easier and easier to find interesting people and ideas that float below the broader internet waterline. They've certainly always been there, but I think it's indicative of some degree of rejection of oligarchic centralized platforms in favor of more democratic systems of interaction. It's early days, but the large platforms are showing their cracks and I think it's possible that more traffic could be diverted from them to places like Lemmy.

Personally, my problem with the more centralized platforms are that their adoption is so widespread that it becomes overwhelming to break in. So many opinions are flying around that it's impossible to engage in a meaningful way. The advantage of smaller platforms like Lemmy or kbin is that it's easier to engage and build community. As they grow, they'll have to figure out how to preserve that aspect, but I think their engineering provides an inherent advantage that other platforms lack.

Something isn't adding up here. 32? Joined Facebook in 2005? Facebook, until 2006, required a valid college (in the American sense) email address. Being 32 would put your high school graduation in the neighborhood of 2009. So did you go to college ~4 years early, sneak on, or do I have something wrong in my timeline?

I'm much younger so I never really got to use these smaller forums, I grew up with a centralised and corporate internet where everyone used the same handful of websites. And then began the enshittification. All the sites I used started getting worse with every update so I stopped using them one by one, with the most recent one being reddit. Moving to the fediverse made me realise just how little I was actually enjoying those sites. I wasn't browsing them for content or for discussion, I was browsing them because I was addicted. Uninstalling the apps and deleting my accounts has done wonders for my mental health, and the smaller community here is so much nicer and more welcoming than the toxic ocean that is social media.