this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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Privacy
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We're in the first act of a shitty, new internet that's fully captured and tracked.
in some ways, it carries on in the spirit of what the internet used to be like in 1995, but by accident/need rather than intention.
back then, the internet was an even mixture of profit seeking companies trying to get your attention and sites that required minimal technical proficiency contained interests/works that the mainstream media pretended didn't exist. over time, things like reddit appeared where it combined the two to get the mainstream hoards so overwhelming in number that the internet has become almost indiscernible to mainstream media.
now, as the mainstream internet enshittifies to protect the mainstream narrative; the people who seek reality over narratives now have to up their technical acumen to continue their access.
the internet is going back to their wild west days because the oligarchy is trying to exert control over it with liberal & conservative consent.
A comforting thought.
it's more than a thought; it's familiarity in ways you've likely forgotten about if you were using the internet as an adult back in 1995 and is now the only way to escape the oligarchy manufactured narratives and capture like op describes.
back then, you can only find things using either word-of-mouth or independent search engines. the instances of the fediverse that have been isolated by the mainstream narrative loving masses (ie hexbear, lemmygrad, etc.) now serve the same word-of-mouth function and things like searxng are fulfilling the independent search engines that altavista, excite, lycos, etc. used to do.
Bring back forum communities, imo
I just joined an old-school phpBB forum dedicated to a specific topic, and it is glorious.
I'm a fan of a very large, and Awful, forum community. It's older than MySpace and the community is... unique.
Spending all your time on there instead of working must put you in a lowtax bracket
I can afford to have stairs in my house at least
Are you protected?
Not with this many goons around.
is that not what lemmy is? lol
It's close-ish.
Forum posts are all in date order, if you reply to someone you do it by quoting them and adding your comment to the post. This ensures that everyone is having the same conversation and you're reading everyone's comments.
In Lemmy/Reddit there will be all kinds of side conversations because you can reply to an individual comment and that makes it's own chain. This makes it difficult to read everyone's comments.
The big thing is that there's no karma system on forums, so you can't be upvoted to the top or downvoted out of the conversation. Moderators may remove/edit offensive comments but otherwise everyone's opinions are treated equally.
A big issue with the karma system is that in a big enough conversation, minority opinions are suppressed with downvotes and the most outrageous/clickbaity comments rise to the top. This really skews the overall conversation, people are incentivized to not deviate from the popular opinion lest they be voted out of the conversation and rewarded for making attention-seeking comments.
It is a reward system that promotes anti-social behaviors (ironically).
It's like the end of the wild west. Goodbye cowboy