Millennials: It’s ok to mourn the death of social media::Wired writes how “first-gen social media users have nowhere to go.” Ouch.
I’m just excited the internet is in part going back to its non corporate backed roots with Lemmy mastodon and the like. The internet started that way, and thanks to the enshitification it will hopefully slowly revert back to it
The idea that corporations were involved in social media was insane looking back. The results were exactly what one would have anticipated
Do we have a Fediverse equivalent of Facebook yet…?
yes, Friendica has been around for longer than Mastodon has.
Facebook does a lot of things. Depends on what exactly you’re looking for. Facebook allows you to follow friends and organizations (= Mastodon), it also allows you to participate in groups (= Lemmy), and then it has a few other features too.
the internet is in part going back to its non corporate backed roots with Lemmy mastodon and the like.
I’m very small part.
and thanks to the enshitification it will hopefully slowly revert back to it
Twitter has proven that they won’t. Reddit has proven that they won’t. They’ve both proven that you can shit all over your own users, give them nothing in return, and they’ll complain for a few days but never leave in any significant numbers. Meta has proven that these shitty corporations can start up wholly new operation (Threads) and the masses will flock to it by the tens of millions.
People have demonstrated over and over that, by and large, they will let these corporations piss on their heads and tell them it’s raining and that they will do absolutely nothing about it.
As someone who was on the internet before social media existed, please let it die in a fire.
Everything now is curated and cultivated by corporations and political entities to weed out any “unacceptable” discourse and content that doesn’t support a particular agenda or narrative.
100% agree. I was learning networking and internet coding back when Javascript was new, web 2.0 was going to revolutionize our lives, and Macromedia was releasing a little animation software called Flash. As an elder Millenial I can confidently say that the death of social media would be the absolute best thing that could happen for our society as a whole. The society was not mature enough for it, still aren’t. Maybe next time it is invented we will be ready and someone will remember to keep the damn corporations out of it.
TBH I’m right there with you when it comes to wishing corporate social media a fiery demise.
And yet, I’m happily using decentralized/non-profit social media that I’d very much like to see flourish. The thing I don’t like about social media today is that it’s billionaires selling personal info to people that want to direct advertising or propaganda to intellectually defenseless people, I really think democracy can’t withstand the firehose of bullshit that now empowers bad actors to lie at scale that used to require traditional media or state resources.
Were BBSs social media?
They were decentralized. If not federated, definitely connected in many aspects.
I was thinking of standing up an instance of this
Just for friends and family
In of the opinion the term social media needs to be broken into two groups. Ones where you’re yourself by name and one’s where you’re an online handle. The “personal” social media are all garbage, but there’s some alright “unpersonal” social media, like Lemmy for example. BBSs would mostly be the later, but probably would be social media if the term existed when they were popular
I don’t mourn “social media.” I mourn what we had before they started using that phrase.
Facebook was actually awesome back in the late 2000s. I had an account when it was just 4 year universities, that was it’s hey day.
You mean traditional media owned and controlled by people like Murdoch? Or rumors and innuendo spread by word of mouth in pubs?
I know you were le born in le wrong generation like every other hipster complainer on the planet but you’d have hated wherever was popular at any time in history because it’s not about finding a balanced and sensible view it’s about hating whatever is popular.
Also no. I meant the forums, chat rooms and instant messengers we had right before Facebook and Twitter ruined it all.
I grew up on those and they were all awful, take off the rose tinted glasses and you’ll see those chat rooms were basically twitch chat with more sexual predators.
And forums still exist and they’re still awfull, having to read fifty stupid comments of people saying totally off topic ‘yes Bob, we got our cat six years ago’ but it fills the entire screen because he’s quoted the entire script of life of Brian in his signature. Finally you find someone replying to the question you were interested in but it’s only to ask another question do you got fifty more comments from poorly replying to questions in the OP which have been answered hours ago but they didn’t bother reading the thread before posting.
And there’s a million great messenger apps out there, of course none of them are as good as they used to be because they don’t have my childhood friends on, or if they do they’re all to busy with kids and carers to come ride bikes.
Hey, I’m fully on board with your defense of social media, but I think in this case the commenter is just saying “i miss the social media we had before they started calling it ‘social media’”. Even 2004 facebook fits this description, and I’m inclined to agree. I miss social media when it felt more like IRC and craigslist, when facebook was a glorified personal guestbook, etc.
It’s also all right to laugh maniacally as it all burns down.
That was my thought.
I don’t mourn it’s death, I celebrate it.
Why though? Did you love it when only the rich could affect popular sentiment?
Rich people like Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg?
Nah, forums are more organic old school is cool.
Forums are social media as well, though. They just have different features. “Social media” are all websites and applications which allow sharing of content between users.
I think a forum was just less anonymous. I never remember any name on Lemmy, for example. On the forums ~back in the day~ I actually got to know the people. We even had forum meetings in real life.
I miss forums. Even on technical forums for a software, there was usually an off topic or random section to hang out in
I fear those sections would look very different today. I watched that unfold in an Otaku forum which was quite nice and peaceful for years. It got radicalised by hateful people until the owner shut it down. The same happened with a gamer forum and several other communities I frequented.
Yeah that’s why it’s a forlorn memory. Forums are way too easy for toxic people to dominate.
If you think about it, atmosphere is social media too
I feel like it should read, “Millenials, remember to drink water in between your champagne glasses while you’re toasting to the death of social media.”
The worst is the ever-shortening of content into an addictive format. It reduces mental clarity.
Removed by mod
Especially fuck meta and xitter.
Worst part is that they actually started out kind of great, and killed all alternatives. Then they became progressively worse because of their predatory algorithms and whatnot, and now it’s borderline impossible to get friends and family to switch to an alternative like mastodon or pixelfed…
From those annoying af fb “games” to those goddamn algorithms.
How do you pronounce xitter?
Think of how the name of current CCP General Secretary Xi is pronounced.
“Shitter”. It’s “Shitter”.
Social Media is cancer. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Social Media is cancer
posted on social media
Modern society in a nutshell
you can be part of a system while not endorsing it or critiquing it
You typed that into social media and posted it, just fyi.
[mattbors-society-comic.jpg]
It’s a fair cop
So you are willfully participating in spreading cancer? Because Lemmy is social media.
Such a simplistic and frankly dumb take, have you really thought about what you’ve said at all?
Regularl people shouldn’t have a voice, all media should be run and distributed by an authority of some kind? If you’re not rich enough to own a newspaper company then you don’t get to express yourself? Only the likes of Rupert Murdoch should be allowed to set trends and influence people?
Or did you just mean ‘some women are popular on social media for doing things that don’t interest me and therefore influencers and all of social media is evil and I hate it’ because that’s what it always seems to boil down to with kneejerk anti haters.
You seem to think that social media is about giving people a voice. It isn’t. Most social media is set up either to harvest users personal data to sell for profit or to sell products to and push ideas on users. In most cases, both. It has become the primary method of distributing propaganda and influencing public opinion generally.
Cancer
you’re basically Alex Jones with that level of paranoid delusion, they’re just a service that exists not a communist plot to turn frogs gay.
And yes of course people attempt to control narratives on social media, you think it was better when Murdoch could just print anything he liked? and if even if you could prove it’s bullshit the only thing you could do was moan about it to some dunks down the pub.
Social media isn’t perfect but your characterisation of it is absurd and based on nothing but kneejerk hatred of change
If propaganda comes from Fox News it’s easy to identify as propaganda, but when people you know are citing seemingly well written and researched studies it’s more complicated. Propaganda has become more believable and widespread because of social media.
But even if you ignore the propaganda, social media is still used to push products with targeted advertising and harvests data to sell to whoever will pay for it. It’s not a conspiracy at all it’s just how capitalism works.
Even if you remove money from the equation all together, you’re seeing the highlights of everyone’s lives which has been shown to lead to depression and feelings of inadequacy.
Not to mention that half the posts and comments on Reddit aren’t even made by humans. Lemmy might be a bit better, but honestly not much.
Literally the only thing social media is good for is memes and even that distracts people from what they’re supposed to be doing and have been shown to be an effective method of spreading disinformation.
Social media is cancer.
How about instead of getting pissy over a valid criticism of companies that you have no duty to defend, either explain why any of the above isn’t true or come up with some positive aspects to social media.
Imagine mourning the death of social media.
I mourn its creation.
I for one celebrate the inevitable crash/death of all this social media. It’s turned normal people into unacceptable drooling trash. That is if you’re able to ignore the data collection and use of it, in which case it turned the whole internet into a dumpster fire as well.
It’s turned normal people into unacceptable drooling trash.
They always were. Social media just gave them a platform to you.
It also gave those trash people the feeling of “look I’m not alone” and amplified all of it. At least before people were worried about being seen as a fuckwit.
Gen Z, I mourned Reddit for 30 seconds. Now I’m here.
On one hand, it’s a bit sad to see the average person not know about the Fediverse and claim “welp, there’s nowhere else to go, it’s either staying on the same ten junkyards I know or quitting cold-turkey”. On the other hand, the relative obscurity kind of comes from the fact that there’s no single main instance of the Fediverse. Sure there’s things like Mastodon.Social, Lemmy.ML and Misskey.GG that concentrate most users of their niche, but by nature, there is not (and should not be) a centralized place where everybody is, that can be used as the poster child for the Fediverse.
More like piss over the grave
As long as humans are social creatures, and the Internet connects us, there will be social media in some form or another.
And as long as multi billion dollar companies are allowed to engage in anti-monopolistic behaviour and erode our privacy by buying politicians, they’ll ruin every form of it to make a quick buck.
