Forums, the fediverse, your own website, and perhaps most controversially of all, outside.

Here’s my hope as a 40-something who came of age when the internet was just taking off.

I REALLY HOPE this is the push we need to move away from corporate-owned social media. I have high hopes for federated platforms and forums that are much more like what the internet was when it started (but better because now we have mobile devices).

I realize a lot of people see social media as being some evil thing, but we also fail to realize how much good it has done. Marginalized communities have come together online and formed real movements. People living with health conditions have been connected to one another for support and also life-changing resources and care. People who were isolated because of disability found communities.

I would like to see old-fashioned blogs and RSS make a comeback. I’d like to see forums and federated sites like Lemmy take off. I’d like to see social media sites that have been given way too much weight in society collapse. I don’t think government or reputable media outlets should ever be using a corporate for-profit entity as a means for distributing information.

I’m not so sure this is a decline of social as much as decline in the control of large corporate interests. Lemmy is getting going well from what I can see. There will be issues but Reddit did as it grew and Twitter made the fail whale meme for their issues. The internet was pretty awesome in the 90s when none of these large companies even existed.

I actually really like this take. Maybe this is just social media growing up, becoming more focused and self aware. The fediverse is currently super rough around the edges, but it really knows what it is. That's more than can be said for pretty much any of the big social networks.

I'm so down for an open, transparent Internet with focused communities and small websites.

Each social media giant is slowly becoming a walled garden, only allowing you to play inside, but not permitting anything out. We saw it with Facebook, now Twitter. Next up, Reddit is now disallowing any outside access without a tollgate.

Lemmy I see more like the German Schrebergarten. These are plots of land, usually not wanted by the major players, or on the outskirts of town. You get a plot portion out of this and build your garden/community out of this. There are no walls in Lemmy, but fences with gates, and you decide which other gardeners have access. There are other plots of land in other parts of the city, and you also decide which of those gardens you'll trade seeds and plants with.

I hope we'll never put up walls.

All this consolidation of all the engagement to three huge platforms was never a good thing anyway

Discord is probably the tool best-suited to capture users’ social needs right now. It’s definitely the best Reddit alternative we have.

Sure, Discord chats are great, particularly for smaller communities/IRL friends. But as an alternative to subreddits or classic forums they're absolute rubbish. Lemmy seems to be the only real game in that town for now.

That was a good read, thanks for sharing.

I'm on the fence on this one since I've mixed views on the social media era of the net. It was great, until we switched from usernames to users (Facebook charging ahead, Google following soon after).

Controversial, but I don't mind the odd clearly marked advert targeted towards the person my browser says I am (i.e. a gamer looking for games, not someone who should be getting life insurance!) - if it isn't invasive and is showing me something I want I'll probably click it and take a look.

What we've seen evolving alongside social media is malvertising by another name - adverts that are using your desire to skip them to trick you into triggering a click. Cable-levels of advertising when listening to music - my radio offers less ads and better music sometimes. Last time I clicked an ad at work by mistake (playing a video for the class), it set of the antivirus.

The prevelance of linking online presence to your "real life", and tying in adverts to that? That's what killed it for me, and likely killed it for everyone else too. Bring back the days of MySpace and Geocities, and those plain banner ads that harmed no-one!

idk maybe it's just frivolous thinking, but imo since social media is corrupted by corporate profiteering brought about by venture capitalists, a social media platform that can be scaled and run very cheaply and in a decentralised fashion (think JUST text posts, all media has to be somehow hosted externally) could genuinely succeed, and be BOTH a mainstream place, while also being friendly to its users, and creating a friendly and cozy environment 🤷‍♀️

The only thing that I was worried about with the alternatives was the websites being spammed with alt right content. Reddit users are not as unhinged as YouTube comments, Facebook, twitter etc. Im glad there’s no alt right content on lemmy. So I’m pretty happy here.

Also I don’t want to have a free speech debate. If you want to post edgy shit go to twitter. For me personally its not something I like. Im not really interested in having a debate. Just personal preference

So glad to see the era of profit driven social media die.

There’s an opportunity in this mess to re imagine the digital commons for the better. What does an online social space look like when it privileges the needs of the community over the needs of capital?

There's still Tumblr! 🥹

I hate it how TikTok is still not banned in most Western countries since it's a shameless CCP-owned propaganda tool and a scary one at that.

TikTok remains ascendent

Which is a damn shame, because it's unusable for literally anything other than sharing alienated, one-off videos. TikTok are masters at keeping people inside their app and nowhere else.