You just need to find a smaller walled garden that can be tended, and not care deeply about having a massive audience and you can still find interesting conversation.
I've seen many Lemmy communities die because their creators abandoned then when they didn't grow fast into thousands of members. This fast growth fixation is so pernicious, if anything web forums and Reddit showed us, is that small communities are higher quality than big ones. Communities in the thousands require a lot of moderation effort to remain high quality.
Enjoy your small circle of internet strangers sharing a common interest, you don't need to become viral.
The gardens that need the most tending, and that will have the most impactful rewards for individuals and communities as a result of said tending, exist in meatspace. Stop searching for walled gardens on the internet and focus on whatever is around you wherever you are. Stop using "More social media but different this time!" as the solution to broken social media.
I found it incredibly rewarding to share my hobbies with people from around the world, with the most diverse backgrounds, in the inherently more walled garden of the early web. That was what the web promised over "meatspace" and I think it would be a shame to lose it.
If anything the open internet seems worse. Every google search for some anodyne home maintenance task returns hundreds of AI-generated slop "guides" with affiliate links. YouTube is the last refuge for real information on this kind of thing. Coming across a human-written guide on the open web is increasingly rare.
I almost clarified that - Google Search is definitely part of that very centralized, corporate-owned web I was referring to. Like what you're describing is exactly what I'm talking about. But there are more and more niche obscure corners of the internet that you don't easily find, where good stuff is happening. People are still using IRC, Hotline, KDX, Gopher, and then there's newer stuff like Gemini ( https://geminiprotocol.net/ ), and potentially-invite-only close-knit communities on Mastodon and Lemmy. Oh yeah and then there's the alternatives to corporate stuff like Instagram -> PixelFed, YouTube -> PeerTube...
You just need to find a smaller walled garden that can be tended, and not care deeply about having a massive audience and you can still find interesting conversation.
I've seen many Lemmy communities die because their creators abandoned then when they didn't grow fast into thousands of members. This fast growth fixation is so pernicious, if anything web forums and Reddit showed us, is that small communities are higher quality than big ones. Communities in the thousands require a lot of moderation effort to remain high quality.
Enjoy your small circle of internet strangers sharing a common interest, you don't need to become viral.
The gardens that need the most tending, and that will have the most impactful rewards for individuals and communities as a result of said tending, exist in meatspace. Stop searching for walled gardens on the internet and focus on whatever is around you wherever you are. Stop using "More social media but different this time!" as the solution to broken social media.
I found it incredibly rewarding to share my hobbies with people from around the world, with the most diverse backgrounds, in the inherently more walled garden of the early web. That was what the web promised over "meatspace" and I think it would be a shame to lose it.
Facebook is not the Internet.
But AI slop is not limited to Facebook. It really is all over the Internet, it dominates entire topics in search engines.
I will never roll over for the lizard man
Don't you use WhatsApp?
maybe the centralized, corporate-owned web, but not the internet... at least, not yet...
If anything the open internet seems worse. Every google search for some anodyne home maintenance task returns hundreds of AI-generated slop "guides" with affiliate links. YouTube is the last refuge for real information on this kind of thing. Coming across a human-written guide on the open web is increasingly rare.
I almost clarified that - Google Search is definitely part of that very centralized, corporate-owned web I was referring to. Like what you're describing is exactly what I'm talking about. But there are more and more niche obscure corners of the internet that you don't easily find, where good stuff is happening. People are still using IRC, Hotline, KDX, Gopher, and then there's newer stuff like Gemini ( https://geminiprotocol.net/ ), and potentially-invite-only close-knit communities on Mastodon and Lemmy. Oh yeah and then there's the alternatives to corporate stuff like Instagram -> PixelFed, YouTube -> PeerTube...