I’m so tired of the centralization that’s been happening for the last decade. The small web, the fediverse and what not, just feels “cozier” in a sense. Even though you meet many toxic people here as well and there isn’t as much information, it still replicates how the early internet felt. And it just feels better. Anyone else agree?
I don’t know about it being cozier (maintaining your own domain/host or even just your own blog requires regular work and some efforts), but my personal blog as well as the blogs or the websites of other persons I regularly read feel a lot more personal and humane to me. And that’s what I’m looking for :)
I could almost say the same for Lemmy and for the Fediverse even though, like you mentioned, there are a lot of morons and assholes around here, once you setup decent filtering rules and stick to well-established personal do’s and don’t it’s quite a nice place with some nice people.
But what old-me think is really odd and sad on the Fediverse in general is to realize how few people and how little they are interested in meeting/discussing with other people outside of those ‘social networks’. That’s how it feels to me, here on Lemmy like on most social networks. It feels a bit like all our interactions should be happening in some public place and should not really be personal.
I’ve linked my blog in my Lemmy profile and, in the year or so I’ve been using Lemmy, I’ve been contacted once through my blog by someone coming from Lemmy. To be honest, I should say it’s impressive considering I was contacted three times total the year before that while I was using Reddit. But still it’s not much. Sure, maybe it’s just my blog that sucks but even a few years ago, I don’t know about you but I received and sent a lot more emails and personal messages. Like a lot more.
To me, it feels like people don’t want ‘personal contact’ anymore, in the sense of a direct person-to-person contact. Instead, they’re focusing on something more akin to a public meeting or something that should happen/be performed in front of an audience.
I have no idea why, nor do I know if I’m right or if it’s just me that lost touch with the rest of the world but that’s how it feels to me. And, to get back to Lemmy, that’s also one of the reasons I like using it: even though discussions will often be performative (we seldom just chat, we say things in front of an audience) it’s still small enough to feel personal, which is great :)
Very interesting thoughts! Definitely agree that people do not seem to prefer personal contact, but to be honest, even on old forums and on IRC I don’t recall messaging people 1-on-1 that much. I think another issue which relates to this community is the fact that people do not tend to read personal websites or blogs that much anymore. While Lemmy, the fediverse is great and all, I still miss more personal websites that aren’t bound together in the same way as everything on the fediverse is.
Thx and yes, I think this is an issue. Not for the well-being of those blogs but as a signal of users unwillingness to find content they can relate to by themselves or more accurately I should say outside of a few main places where everyone is expecting to fond them be they privately owned or even Free/Libre/Federated.