I’m talking about what they say at 8:20:
Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The main difference to today was twofold:
For one there were no algorithms fighting to keep you online at any cost – at some point you were done with the internet for the day, as mind blowing as this may sound.
But more importantly: The old internet was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages gathering around shared beliefs and interests.
These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains. These communities worked because they mirrored real life much more than social media:
Each village had its own culture and set of rules. Maybe one community was into rough humour and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned easily.
If you didn’t play by the village rules, you would be banned – or you could just go and move to another village that suited you better.
So instead of all of us gathering in one place, overwhelming our brains at a townsquare that in the end just leads to us going insane, one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple:
go back to smaller online communities.
But the concept of federation in the fediverse removes these separations.
Not really, each Mastodon or Lemmy instance still has its own culture and rules. Federation just allows you to travel across borders with your same passport.
Some definitly do, but I think it depends on which one you’re on and how you use it. All my communities are on other instances and unless it’s an extreme instance like lemmygrad, I basically don’t really care or pay attention to on which instance a community is.
Yeah you’re not wrong, but just because they choose to be similar doesn’t negate the ability to be different if desired, something not afforded to people who ran communities on commercial platforms.
The concept of Federation ensures the ability to do ones own thing if desired, not negate it.
The Fediverse just gives a path, it doesn’t restrict the paths. Anyone can make or join any community.
You could say the same about facebook groups or reddit. As long as you have an account on the platform, you can interact with any community on the platform. That’s not separation.
They were talking about the early days, where you had to make an account for every different forum or community you joined and there was basically no interaction between those different forums.