The only thing I wish I could deny is the 40+ part

Nope. You got the time period right, but I would like to posit it’s when they started letting our Parents, drunk uncles and dumb ass aunties on Facebook.

The problem always has, and always will be, Facebook.

I had a geocities page all about skateboarding. I’d give you the url, but I neither remember it, nor doubt your phone is wide enough for a url that long

It’s been corporate the entire time. The rise of the www literally fueled a global economic bubble.

Our current crop of old people sucks badly. I aim to grow wise and notmerely grow old

Sadly that's how some people think

Kings Quest 4 on like 8 disks I think?

Agreed

Narrator:This person, naturally, remained celibate for their entire life.

The fact that we're not corposlop gives structural resistance to it. Just don't let us get EEE'd

I am in my mid-30s i will have you know!

I run Arch, btw.

What's there to lay out, other than what anyone can read from the Wikipedia entries?

The Internet is a specific global network of computer nodes that use some version of the Internet Protocol to communicate with each other. There are many different services over on it. The WWW is simply one such service.

You don't know my stats, dawg. I rolled sick in luck; my life partner was a virgin when I met him. I mean, he still is a virgin, but he used to be one too!

I don't have enough seltzer for this shit

The bubble was because of speculative finance assholes ripping each other off by pointing at the thin vaneer of corporate windows built on the tools that were mostly developed by the military, universities, CERN and countless nerds' computer rooms and garages.

Corporations are made of people, and people more broadly let them gain power. That doesn't seem like a defence, it's just a description of our failure.

We probably should have

Yes, bow to me, the grand architect of geocities Dragon Ball Z pages.

In my experience most software developers have very little understanding of complexity, and mostly ignore it or try to design around it, nor with it. Which is mostly just a function of them needing to work to get by, not to contribute something meaningful to society.

I hope he’s not speaking for me cuse I ain’t 40 and I’ll hold on till like last mastodon

The bit we should regret is that we let the rich corporates steal it.

I completely agree. Should have never taught the geriatric community how to access FB

The primary issue is: not anymore.

Coming here for discussion and meme dopamine, Lemmy still has that intact. Reddit has killed it with bots, ads, and some heavy duty corporate lean on things.

r/castiron, dominated by Lodge Corpo as one example. Other “suggestions”, too early in the day to recall more names right now, are in a parrot circle of replies for brands, as above.

You can’t trust it as much, which is why, in part, people are here instead. More old, old Reddit feels, you know, before it became cool and was thus inevitably ruined.

We thank you for your service.

Indeed. You were up above it.

A lot of forum admins just got old. It's more like the IT nerd boomers and gen-x built the internet. They were middle age when we were kids. Most of us whippersnappers were being babysat by them.

Good luck convincing any normie on the internet today that it was actually a boomer who built the world wide web. All they see is tech illiterate old people who only made the world worse. And for some reason gen-x doesn't exist to them.

Never thought I would say we need to decentralize the Internet

I'm 60 and was tired of companies before you were born, AI is just the same shit served on a different cracker, I'm also on Linux :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yFTOvO0utY

...Do you unironically believe people are getting paid to be on lemmy?

"shill" implies payment, Lemmy is just way too under the radar for that kind of engagement

And by the time you have shills the network will be drowned in LLMs already. The latter hasn't happened, it's pure paranoia to think the former is anything to be concerned with.

Honestly someone should have just whooped Zucks ass and shut down Facebook entirely. It’s whole original premise was scummy and if only got worse. There was data at the time showing how bad it was. The roll out to various colleges was happening at the same time as a nationwide student health and wellness survey. Mental health dropped significantly whenever access was opened to a college.

The WWW was built for everyone.

We let rich assholes steal it out of laziness.

Take for example, Facebook vs MySpace or similar. Making a Facebook is instant, making a MySpace took effort. Setting up a subreddit is instant and free and gets you an immediate registered audience, setting up a vBulletin or similar forum is time-consuming and costs money and getting any traffic is an uphill battle. Same thing with posting- on Reddit just mozy on over to that sub and hit post, on a forum you have to register. Or you want to make videos? Gotta pay for a decent web hosting plan, lots of bandwidth, and deal with encoding, playback scripts, etc. Or just make a YouTube and hit 'upload'.

So we let big platforms take over the Internet. We gained a fuckton of features and convenience. We didn't consider what we lost- creativity, and the independence of not having to make everything advertiser-friendly.

Monetization is the other frenemy. It's great that creators can get paid for their work easily. But what we lose with that is every creator pandering to the algorithm, every video begs 'like comment and subscribe!', videos shy away from advertiser-unfriendly topics, and the kid filter brainrot is starting to infect common lexicon ('my brother got caught watching corn and now he's gonna unalive himself with a pewpew' type nonsense).

For that reason I think decentralization and federation are the way out.

Look at forums for example- one of the biggest barriers to entry was registration, getting people to care enough to bother registering. Lemmy fixes that, and you can still make a community as closed and private as you want.

I'm hoping a new group of websites will spring up from this. My only fear is they will all drown in a sea of AI slop.

Compared with whom? Complexity in general is a rather elusive concept, and since its effects on software are (usually) cumulative over multiple years, devs working in systems that reward quarterly or annual performance metrics are incentivized to ignore it. I don't think ignoring complexity because your job compels you to is the same as not understanding it.

Most of the devs I've worked with grasp the theory of complexity fairly easily once it's been explained to them, but tend to underestimate their own ability to manage it because they don't account for how their scrum-addled environment impacts the quality of the code they write. They just look on the tangled mess they've wrought and assume the fault is individual, not systemic.

Dicks out and enter the dark timeline.

There, I've fixed it.

for 40+ people who built the WWW then sold it to the enshitifiers, which they now regret

And that's just the "nice" one that people still federate with.

I'm a climate scientist, I've been a web dev, and I've worked with complexity in climate, risk, and management spaces. So, compared to those I guess. I've worked with some software devs who are well aware of complexity concepts, but I've never really seen any of them take a complexity-first approach.

I fully acknowledge that I have a particular perspective, but I struggle to believe that most software devs in generic workplaces are better at complexity thinking than the ones I've worked with, given the content we were working with.

Yeah... That shit with ICANN and Autistici kinda raises some red flags now though...

You checked out Neocities yet? I've been thinking of signing up.

But alas, now they are down in it

That's fair. I'm not trying to suggest that software development makes one uniquely capable of understanding complex systems, or complexity generally; more that the work tends to involve injecting more and more complexity into systems until they're tottering under their own weight, as the Web is doing now. Managing that complexity ramp (or more often, failing to do so) is a part of maintaining software, and devs should be familiar with the prospect of a project that has morphed into something beyond their expectations.

People on here think too highly of themselves and the Fediverse. The overwhelming majority of people here don't know the basics of programming and of the few that do, the vast majority of them don't make any contributions. Even to those who do contribute, comparing themselves or the Fediverse WWW and the people who built it rather arrogant, no?

At the end of the day, the Fediverse would be better off going through a reality check. It's a niche alternative to mainstream social media that trades content for privacy. The tech is neat and the idea behind it is noble, but that's about it. It's not going to revolutionize the internet any time soon.

Lawyer: You can't divorce your wife, just because she's a bit odd.

Micky: I said, she's fucking Goofy!

The internet itself was once a niche alternative to mainstream knowledge

The way I see it is, that we are all good or even experts at something. The internet is not only about programming alone. The frustration comes from people who 30 years ago spent time discussing and sharing all kinds of knowledge on websites, forums or wikis but now, large corporations charge money to present the same knowledge more conveniently, but not always in the right context

This includes programming, but also gardening, how to ferment cabbage, how to clean a smoking pipe, what to feed guinea pigs.

It is definitely doable, but will take many decades

It was not sold. It was taken/stolen

someone should have just shut down Facebook entirely

And nothing of value would be lost.

/fistclench

We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good,