sh.itjust.works Main Community

It feels like the early Internet: it's still being actively improved, it's noncommercial, people are weirder, people are passionate, fewer bots, it's kind of exciting.

I have no idea if it will succeed, but it's a nice feeling.

I want to see it grow just to prove the concept works at scale. I genuinely believe it will and I'm a cynical bastard.

I agree with the community aspect, and I’m also happy about the open source part. I saw your post in my RSS reader as I was going through my other news and interests. It feels so good to not have the stuff I see decided by some big corporation intending to maximize my engagement at the expense of everything else.

If anyone is interested in RSS, let me know. I highly recommend it, it’s so refreshing to be able to follow most of what you’re interested in, in one app. Also a small app, ~10 MB vs many news sites’ apps that are ~150 MB. Also no ads, ability to dismiss read articles.

(Also yes I realize that Reddit supports RSS too, but I heard that they would have taken it away long ago if it their internal tools didn’t heavily depend on it. The API changes make this seem likely)

At some point, when instances get big enough, the large costs may require running ads for upkeep. But ideally it should stop at "just covering the costs" and not needing to do the capitalism thing to keep making more and more money every quarter

I've been all-in on the fediverse since early 2021. Just like anywhere more than one person is there's disagreements and drama now and again, but it's been the sort of place I want to be and spend my time.

I think it's great that more people are realising what's possible, open source isn't just going up change the internet into what it should have been but it can change everything from printers requiring proprietary ink to the major excesses of the political machine.

The working people have ALWAYS done the work and when we get together and do it for ourselves, and each other, we can build a world that exists for people not profits.

I like to call it the reddit effect. Any serious attempt to control the free exchange of ideas on the internet leads to avenues that are freer and less controllable getting built. Don't mourn for reddit, they may have been captured by corporate greed, but they have passed the torch to a freer and less centralized community that is less susceptible to corporate invasion. You can't stop the signal Mal

This reminds me of how Reddit was after switching from Digg. It feels smaller and more organic and a much more friendly environment. I just feel like I used Reddit for a lot of information and searches for troubleshooting or how to purposes. That vast wealth of knowledge feels like it may be lost.

Same with moving from twitter to a mastodon instance, feels like twitter when it was young.

It really does feel a bit like the old days ^tm^ (IRC and random PHP boards for me) and it gives me a bit of hope that some of the spirit of the old Wild West Internet is still here. To be honest I engaged more with lemmy in the last few days, then with anything in the last 5 Years.

Unfortunately, I think the feediverse in its unpolished, unoptimised and non-compliant state will run into some legal trouble as soon as it hits a certain popularity threshold.

*Looking at you EU and your relentless drive towards censorship >.>

In the worst case, we will have to rebuild a feediverse in the darker corners of the net.

i think we have seen how algorithms divide us in a lot of ways, esp when we are unaware of the way they work and how they are altering our feeds.

It has a long way to go but even Reddit was a small niche website (everyone was on Digg!) at one point.

I'm very curious how this type of platform might perform under mass adoption. If it started getting anywhere close to reddit level traffic I'm sceptical how well the more popular instances would scale, and how the people that can currently afford to run them would be able to afford the infrastructure needed to keep up with millions of users.

We all should have done this a long time ago.

I'm also new here and I feel the same as you. I deleted my reddit account just before Sync died and ended up here (thanks for having me). I am still trying to figure out my way around the fediverse but I'll get there. Lemmy feels a bit rough around the edges but honestly it has a certain charm to it that way.

Yup it has the potential to let people communicate and enjoy time together without big corps in the middle.

Agree. Next up education and health care.

Feels like when IRC and e-mail was the prefered way to communicate.