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
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.
Mourning? More like dancing on its grave. With the fediverse being everything social media 1.0 was and more, there is no need for the legacy platforms. I just hope that the fediverse can get some more traction with folks outside tech circles and we can normalize cooperation and free social platforms as in free speech not as in free beer.
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 thing that threw me off Facebook was the 2016 election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, even though I ran a popular meme page. I thought I found a sanctuary on Reddit, but looking back everything major on it was shilled to advertise or sow political discord. I thought Google Plus had a lot of potential, but nobody I knew would join and y’know, Google’s privacy record.
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.
I grew up on forums / IRC / IMs, later transitioned to Myspace, then Twitter / Facebook / Tumblr / Instagram. I had a lot of fun over the years, it definitely saddens me that I can't get the things I liked about those experiences back.
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.
I'm not mourning, I've just done what I've done every few years for at least a decade now and just found a new fucking home. Plus, I think this and mastodon will be my home for awhile now since the decentralized nature of it makes it really easy to avoid the bullshit that brought me here.
Is this their first platform death? Come on, Wired!
Millennials have been losing platforms on the Internet for pretty much the whole history of the Internet. Just a handful of "social media" type services that have risen and fallen in my years of the internet: AOL Instant Message, ICQ, IRC, Usenet, LiveJournal, MySpace, on and on.
Most of these aren't even properly "dead", many I just.mentioned still have big user groups too. They just lost a critical user share when folks moved on.
If traditional social media platforms die, then most of their users will move to federated ones and end up turning those into dumpster fires. I'm a Reddit migrant and I've already noticed Reddit behavior just a couple weeks in, also known as "not good". I'm getting the vibe that Mastodon could suffer from this a few months or years from now due to Elon Musk's questionable decisions regarding Twitt- I mean X, and the fact that nobody uses Threads anymore (it's basically a giant Israel-Palestine debate right now). I'm not sure about PixelFed or PeerTube or any of the other ActivityPub alternatives to traditional platforms.
Is it worth adding the "van Lemmy" suffix to my username? Yeah, it sounds more Flemish (I am not from Flanders), and it reveals to the world that I'm some random loser from the fediverse, even though I've only ever spent a few months here. Also, there's probably a few other folks who refer to themselves as "Resol", so it kinda makes me stand out.