Mastodon toot:
Daniel Lakeland @[email protected]
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
there’s 2 kinds of people on fedi:
40 year olds who remember the good ol days of the interwebs
16 year old queer shitposters who got tired of getting called every slur imaginable on other networks
both are into linux
Queer less than 25 here, I came here not because I was getting called slurs but because I’m tired of companies and of AI, I’m also on Linux :3
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 :)
Good man(/woman/person/other-identity-that-represents-you)!
you forgot the 3rd kind
Russian bots
also into linux
Isn’t that something else? No matter where you are on the planet, if you know technology, you despise Windows.
Always has been.
Well, since 1978 or so.
Almost no one was into Linux back then though
The first version was released in 1991.
I think you meant to say 40 year old queer shitposters
the 3rd kind is people too toxic for reddit and got banned
i guess im the 4th kind
Luckily it is typically too small to be much of a bot target. I don’t subscribe to world news subs though, dark places.
It’s usually only the news subs. But if you make claims that counter Kremlin propaganda you can sometimes summon them.
Like if I just say Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine, it won’t (why? Beats me). But if I say they are killing ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens as well as Ukrainian men, women, and children, then we have a good chance.
I got others if it doesn’t work.
Edit: (WITNESS ME! Lol) Edit 2: Now I’m impressed. I knew I could do it, I didn’t expect it to work quite so well. I’ll check back in a few hours.
“People disagreeing with me are bots”
Why you people always gotta take everything as black and white. I use “bot” interchangeably with “shill.”
Edit: I see no one found the humor with switching the actual thing that is black and white in his statement (“Everyone I disagree with”) with the “bot” and “shill” thing.
Third kind (the only people I know from real life who use the fediverse): Tech/math enthusiasts, usually grad students (who are also into linux)
I am in my mid-30s i will have you know!
I run Arch, btw.
I have to use Windows at work now, which is ass.
Anyway, I had a question about how to achieve something in Powershell the other day, so I asked it on Mastodon. Got basically nothing in response.
Every time I ask how to do something in Linux I get swamped with responses.
Make of that what you will.
I use powershell on linux, it’s on AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/powershell
I write scripts on my linux machine then run them on windows workstations
I thought I was alone!
Where do fifty-something furries fit to this?
We know all IT departments are primarily composed of furries, so it’s just a branch of number 1 really.
LGBT40+
Excuse me, I’m not 40 for a few more years yet tyvm!
What about us 20 somethings who vaguely remember the good ol days as they were fading away?
I’m a Luddite who discovered this shit inadvertently, and still doesn’t actually understand how any of it works
But you’re correct in that I’m pushing 50
I can be a 40 years old queer friendly tired of being called slurs wanting to go back, with a mindset of a 16 year old…
I’m flattered that you think I’m 16 and didn’t just turn double that this month c’:
Fuck that. I don’t regret it. We built the world wide web from nothing for everyone and had it fucking stolen by rich assholes who put our community resources WE developed behind ads and paywalls. Unlike those uncreative hacks we have the talent to take it back.
The bit we should regret is that we let the rich corporates steal it.
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.
/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,
I can’t understate how much I love this art
I think you mean overstate? Otherwise you’re saying that you don’t really like it at all.
Yeah, overstate. But I will still leave the comment unedited
It’s ok, we overstood you. But yeah, pmjv is a fucking genius.
What did I do this time?!
Me 😉
Don’t you remember?
Yes, bow to me, the grand architect of geocities Dragon Ball Z pages.
bows deeply
We thank you for your service.
You checked out Neocities yet? I’ve been thinking of signing up.
I personally blame the iPhone. Shit all started going downhill from then
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.
It’s not Facebook either. The concept of letting too many of “those” people in to quickly and destroying the culture is known as “eternal September” and is from 93-94.
But what made it more accessible and easy to access places like Facebook in the first place? Smart phones.
Smartphones weren’t really all that popular until 2007, and none of the ones before the iPhone 3G or like the Blackberry’s could really run Facebook all that well. The iPhone never really blew up to the level it’s at now until the 4 arguably, which didn’t come out until 2010 or 2011 (think it was 2010). Facebook had already been pretty infected before then.
I completely agree. Should have never taught the geriatric community how to access FB
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.
someone should have just shut down Facebook entirely
And nothing of value would be lost.
It really is a lot like religion. All the good stuff you can get somewhere else but much of the bad stuff is unique.
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.
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
I mean you’re technically right, it is possible in theory. However, do you actually think that will be the case? I personally don’t see it.
The WWW made vast amounts of information remotely accessible and easy to navigate. Likewise, social media made large scale remote and asynchronous social interaction possible. Even though both took decades to evolve into what they are today, they fundamentally transformed how people access information and connect with one another. That’s what makes them revolutionary.
The Fediverse isn’t exactly like that. It’s a neat piece of tech, but it doesn’t exactly solve a problem that couldn’t already be solved. You can already communicate with people remotely, build communities, publish content, and interact with people across different platforms. The main thing that the Fediverse is trying to sell people on is decentralization which comes with perks like extra privacy and control, but which is valuable hence why this place has a genuine userbase, but I don’t see it going beyond that.
As it stands now the Fediverse is just another platform competing in a sea of other platforms. The Fediverse is already around a decade old, and not much has changed during this time. It was niche a decade ago, and it’s still niche now. The spot that it carved in the ecosystem is that of social media alternative that caters to left wing politics and tech bros. Even if it becomes more mainstream, it’ll still be viewed as another form of social media rather than something entirely new and different. The Fediverse is most certainly not like the WWW.
Who are all these people comparing the WWW and social media as a concept to the significance of the fediverse? I’ve never seen it. Lots of people are excited about the concept of a decentralized reddit-like social media, but I’ve never seen anyone express what you described.
Feels like we’re getting annoyed at nothing here honestly.
Software developers are on Mastadon, though. Big time.
The Fediverse in general attracts a lot of tech people compared to elsewhere, but even then, they’re still a minority.
Im sorry but I did not contribute to this in any meaningful way.
Uhhh excuse you, you create the meaningful content!
Says you
BITCH I EAT PEOPLE
Eek
Sorry that was rude. I just like your posts. You’re an essential part of the fediverse and I hope you make more 🌷
I would say I like it here, imo the format and overall technology is perfect. I am always impressed by how little battery and data voyager uses compared to all the other bloated apps on my phone.
Having said that, I am disappointed that even without feeds and algorithms, it has become a lot more rage inducing and depressing then I would have hoped for.
There is just so many things that affect my life in a negative way being shown here, can’t a guy get a little ignorant bliss about nerdy topics? Or long, deep discussions comparing the philosophies of niche hobbies?
I agree. After being here for a while, I realized that my feed is always depressing and negative, and the comments and discussions are as well, to the point where I pretty much stopped using Lemmy for a while. But I guess the solution is simply to seek out other communities that are more positive - there should be plenty to choose from :)
I think it is kinda the same ‘echo chamber’ problem that other social media has - I feel my own opinions are being reinforced to the extreme, and while I am glad to be with like-minded people, it is also very exhausting.
Anyway, time to go exploring new communities!
Agree. But I do have a extremely long block list of communities that I find that seem to be all about news are negative shit or click bait. Lots of users and a fair about if keywords.
I figured if it’s going to make me feel like shit why not just have my feed never show me it again.
I have so many filters just to block depressing news… Also to block strange hive mind posts about beans etc.
That’s one thing you can do here that you (no longer) can on Reddit
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.
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.
Equal access for all is still better than one company controlling access to my content for the purposes of monetization.
It was supposed to make everything better, we were sure of it.
We were horribly wrong. Sorry.
We built it first on PHP and later Node.js. It was clear from the start we had no idea what we were doing.
My take is that the fediverse is nice because it’s still in its pre-enshittification phase. Give it time.
Hopefully its design makes it resistant to enshittification.
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.
enshittification just means corporate control and advertising
That is what enshittification means. It is specifically a corporation making it’s product shittier because they’ve cornered the market.
Thanks, silly me assumed a word like “enshittification” would just mean “made shitty”.
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
I know the theory, but it really just puts enshittification in different hands.
Well, you are using world, which is like the reddit of lemmy
Accurate.
Never thought I would say we need to decentralize the Internet
Yeah… That shit with ICANN and Autistici kinda raises some red flags now though…
If we unite, we can regret it again.
That was my first thought. If we believe in ourselves we can fill Lemmy with ads and make it a subscription service and sell everyone’s data to the lowest bidder. We can do it!
im gonna gift you Lemmy Plutonium for this!
Wait I’m considered young here even though I’m in my late 30s?
You are but a whelpling. Welcome.
Yup, some of us are old enough to call the 40 and 50 year olds “young whippersnappers”.
Thanks glad I’m here
You seem like a polite child, but isn’t it a little late for you to be up? Hurry to bed before your parents find out.
Not super young, but young for the group. Hell, I’m in my mid 40s (I think. Please don’t ask me to do the math) and I get the sense I’m on the young end of the primary demographic here
it’s dangerous to get too excited at your age, gramps, your heart might not take it
