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Some of the planned blackouts will be temporary, others plan to shut their subreddits down indefinitely in protest.

  • tangentism@beehaw.org
    24·
    2 years ago

    I’ve people who remember the web in the late 90s / early 2000s, repeatedly comment that they miss finding weird, leftfield and wacky blogs and sites and that the last decade has been corporates vacuuming up anything that was interesting, subsuming it into their ecosphere to then let it wither and die because they didn’t understand it, just that it was gaining popularity.

    If you look at the front page of Reddit now, its just recycled memes, content cross posted from the same corporate own sites such as Twitter and TikTok and endless reposts by bot accounts that are karma farming so they can be used for astro turfing.

    There are niche communities and they are the ones suffering from this API policy but its time they all bailed and found better homes.

    • Xer0@lemmy.ml
      9·
      2 years ago

      I’m one of those people. The old web was so much more exciting and interesting before corporations started owning everything. I made a community called oldweb here on lemmy for this exact reason of sharing old websites, quirky personal blogs/sites etc.

    • xiemeon@feddit.de
      3·
      2 years ago

      Absolutely. The “old web” was perhaps a bit on the (visually) ugly side, but we were free. Not much corporate going on, but much exploring the seemingly infinite possibilities together, as free users. Sure, there were some small online shops for hobbyists and special interest stuff, but they always were - in my experience - firmly connected to if not operated and driven by that community. It is hard to describe - it simply was great. The final frontier, so it seemed. Connect to freaks like yourself all over the world, or explore new exiting topics, music, cultures. Learn a ton of stuff for free. Really connect.

      But then capitalism crept in - I cannot even draw a clear line when that all happened (Can someone here help me out here?) and as we all know now they built their monopolies and now the web is made up of those “five corporate websites showing screenshots of the other four” or how that famous quote went. I really think and hope the fediverse is a opportunity to rebuild a better, user-centered web.

      That being said, is there a kind of implementation of the fediverse for / with projects like peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol (e.g. IPFS) and/or the onion web? (or perhaps that’s material for another discussion/thread, eh?)