Mastodon toot:

Daniel Lakeland
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org

Fediverse, the social media system for 40+ year old people who built the world wide web and regret it.

Oct 01, 2026, 11:32 PM

Accurate.

You rang?

There are some lost kids wandering around complaining about their moms...

I dunno how they found it into here.

Not 40, but also don't want my thoughts and comments to be an income stream for a for-profit organization, whether that be by selling my data for profit, training an LLM with my data, or contributing to an inescapable network effect that can be increasingly monetized by various means.

The modern social media platform is not designed to foster positive interactions, but rather to maximize shareholder value.

I don't regret it. I only regret letting the corporations stake their claim without greater pushback.

complaining about their +70 year old mom

Also for people with severe superiority complexes

My take is that the fediverse is nice because it's still in its pre-enshittification phase. Give it time.

I’m about half that age, and I’ve met at least a couple grads and undergrad students on here that I assumed were also in their 20s…

Hey no fair! I'm 30, I grew up on the Internet and hate what it became

I think there's two general kinds of people on the fediverse: Those who believe in whatever freedom, security, privacy, whatever, and the rest of us that came from somewhere else that went off the deep end of enshittification.

Wow, wrong, and what an ignorant point of view.

(/s) :)

true.

Honestly really glad, I'm tired of reading teenager opinions everywhere on the Internet

Wanna see us do it again? 💪 let's do this, team

It's designed to resist corpo capture via interoperability... if it starts enshittifying, hopefully this will allow users to shift over without incurring too much switching cost keeping them in place

Why did you repeat what op said

I just wanted my Geocities page back.

I know the theory, but it really just puts enshittification in different hands.

who are all wrong. Clearly I'm the most superior.

20 year old reporting for duty

Hopefully its design makes it resistant to enshittification.

Damn bro I'm not 40 yet. We age fast enough, don't rush it lol

I just made a neocities page, highly recommend

How dare you accuse me of contributing anything other than shitposts to the world wide web.

So was the united States... Lol. But I'm hoping for better here

i'm 39 and haven't built shit but the regret is real

Joke’s on you: my opinions are just as bad.

you leave my muddah out 'o this!

The people who built the web aren't the ones responsible for its' consolidation.

Ditto

Wow

im over 50 and lee is way older than I. Granted www was just being born when I was in college.

The great thing about the Internet is that people can just find stuff, often by accident.

also don’t want my thoughts and comments to be an income stream for a for-profit organization

I mean, you're fooling yourself if you don't believe Lemmy has been scrapped by a thousand crawlers by now.

I'm more paranoid about how many accounts are bots than about some data aggregator getting my dumbshit hot takes as training data.

I didn't build it, but I was raised by it. I was so hopeful when I was younger.

see you on Reticulum!

Yeah? Well I also have shit opinions.

Well, people used to be able to do that. Nowadays, IDK...

Yeah this one Cuts deep

🔘I’m in this meme and I don’t like it

(Sorry for everything.)

See, this is why I love Lemmy. The good parts are like everyone's grey beard uncles got together and are all trying to tell the best goofball jokes.

"I was there, Gandalf."

I think mine are the best there is. I do have a problem with objective judgment though

“The best time to join the fediverse is 10 years ago, second best time is today.”

• Wayne Gretzky
• Michael Scott

I am bolth

I like the Web.

I don't like all of the websites out there and avoid using some, but I think that that was always going to be the case.

I guess that maybe it's a little surprising that there was the degree of consolidation that there was among the broader population into use of some specific websites. But...well, network effect applies to social media, so you'd expect at least some natural tendency in that direction.

considers

I guess that the degree of shift to social media as a whole is surprising to me. Like, most really important websites are social media websites. But, well, I'd always used social media myself, even prior to the term being coined, so the idea that others might want to use it doesn't seem that strange. BBSes, Usenet. I wasn't a user of The WELL, but there's another influential forum.

And a shift to Web-based social media was predicted. Those of us who were around probably remember use of the term "Web 2.0":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Web 2.0 (also known as participative, participatory,[1] web and social web)[2] refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture, and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and devices) for end users.

The term was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999[3] and later popularized by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at the first Web 2.0 Conference in 2004.[4][5][6] Although the term mimics the numbering of software versions, it does not denote a formal change in the nature of the World Wide Web;[7] the term merely describes a general change that occurred during this period as interactive websites proliferated and came to overshadow the older, more static websites of the original Web.[2]

A Web 2.0 website allows users to interact and collaborate through social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community. This contrasts the first generation of Web 1.0-era websites where people were limited to passively viewing content. Examples of Web 2.0 features include social networking sites or social media sites (e.g., Facebook), blogs, wikis, folksonomies ("tagging" keywords on websites and links), video sharing sites (e.g., YouTube), image sharing sites (e.g., Flickr), hosted services, Web applications ("apps"), collaborative consumption platforms, and mashup applications.

Whether Web 2.0 is substantially different from prior Web technologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who describes the term as jargon.[8] His original vision of the Web was "a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write".[9][10] On the other hand, the term Semantic Web (sometimes referred to as Web 3.0)[11] was coined by Berners-Lee to refer to a web of content where the meaning can be processed by machines.[12]

By Berners-Lee's statement there, he always expected the Web to have a social aspect.

Lemmy is under 25 and over 45 absolutely no in between

Depends... if enshittification just means corporate control and advertising, I have high hopes for the design. If enshittification also includes things like personal insults, echo chambers and gatekeeping, those ships have already sailed as expected.