A story of our land, and hopefully a bit of a link with the future of the Fediverse.
Great choice of community name and first post. I was thinking the fediverse seems like a more authentic web3 than the actual bullshit web3 stuff. With the revelation of how important Reddit was to good google results (with folks commonly using ‘reddit’ as a search modifier), along with the hit those results took during the Reddit blackout, and also the rise of people noticing the general shittification of Google’s search results I think we may be seeing a more grass-roots and ‘organic’ move to a new kind of web and that activitypub may be the common thread that connects not just social media but many conventional websites together. I went looking for an activitypub integration for a particular web framework the other day and sure enough there was one, not fully featured but I think it’ll get there eventually. The possibilities seems endless.
The idea of Web3 - that things are decentralised with interconnected but independent locations is just regular Web. It’s what we had before some person with a marketing degree and a love of buzzwords coined the term “Web 2.0”.
We sacrificed all that for a lower barrier of entry and mainstream adoption. The independence cost too much in the end because we gave control to our interactions to companies who wanted to make a profit.
Honestly, this fediverse/Lemmy is how the Internet has always been. My first post to Usenet was in 1989, and the difference between newsgroups and Lemmy is mostly front end. We had Newsgroup servers (instances), news groups (Communities) Subscriptions and much the same people/culture as this 30+ years ago. Posts to news groups were all plain text; closer to email messages than this. We didn’t have voting. But the rest feels very familiar to me.
