And because we aren’t chasing profit, mass adoption, or clout here, we can get increasingly local and granular with our instances, and increasingly rigorous about who we let in. Since what we’re chasing is real community, we have nothing to sell out for. And even if some instances do flip over to corpos, we can just defederate and welcome the inevitable influx of departing users.

The thing you really have to look out for in the future is “premium” instances or forks of Lemmy which are paywalled, and eventually locked down to a single instance. It just becomes the next Twitter. It’s unlikely, but something to be wary of once the rest of the open internet is picked clean.

Shame that capital is without a doubt mining our genuine public communications for their wage depressing plagiarism machines, because it’s not like you can get that from the old place anymore.

Wasn’t Ask Jeeves the best search engine?

I think the expression is the capitalists will sell you the rope with which you’ll hang them.

So long as you’re planning to hang them next quarter – they can’t see that far.

A map in your browser with full scrolling and zooming may have been impressive back then, it’s true. But you know what’s impressive today?

$ telnet mapscii.me

A map in your terminal with full scrolling and zooming. 😎

Are you telling me Bonzai Buddy was not really my Buddy?

More of a Gemini person, myself. On Offpunk or Geopard, depending on the mood.

Yo what extensions? I had a really good one that made thumbnails less interesting, and cut out a lot of the CTAs, but I seem to have lost it.

Yup. Mainstream social media is chaos, not community. I would even extend this to fedi if we aren’t careful.

It was for sure toxic af, but a lot less commercial. Actually the early internet was incredibly hostile to corps, but then the banner ads came, and the eyeballs, and the ads started actually making more money than just server costs, and it was all over.

That’s illegal!

You can recognise someone as fully human and capable of redemption and still fight them because their actions endanger the helpless.