I actually got banned from this community on my old lemm.ee account under the same username. So I don’t make actual posts here. Idk if I’m even technically supposed to be commenting, so 🤫
Even so, Lemmy is nothing like what Reddit has become. Any platform is susceptible, but Reddit is now controlled by people who are out to prove a Fred Phelps like point about free speech. If you can’t say whatever you want, whenever you want, to anyone you want, go out of your way to ruin it for everybody and die miserable and alone.
Even if that does end up happening here, somebody else will just build back something new and a little better to replace it.
Fascists complained for decades about being censored on the internet and in that time what did they actually do? Did they actually build their own alternatives that anybody wanted to use, or did they just scheme and claw their way to the top to take over what somebody else made and force what they wanted on to everyone?
It’s true, they’ve basically made just about every popular internet platform unuseable in like 9 months, but that has also driven more people to just seek alternatives, and other people to focus on building them or making what already exists more user friendly. So when people just stop using that garbage, what happens to all those paid sponsors? Do they just keep paying to advertise to no one?
The dead internet theory just kind of assumes that people will want to keep using these platforms to witness bots argue instead of interacting with other people, but I can’t even really scroll through Reddit or Substack anymore bc I know there’s better content somewhere else that isn’t being controlled to keep a narrative going.
I tried to look for a very specific topic on YouTube yesterday, and got so frustrated with only having an endless stream of short clips of influencers instead of the one thing that I actually wanted, that I ended up just making an account on peertube. There’s not much content on there (yet), but the small amount that is there is sooo much more interesting than 99% of the garbage being force fed by YouTube.
I’m pretty sure that’s actually how capitalism is supposed to work when a “free market” isn’t being completely controlled by oligarchs. Like if this product sucks, and this other product is available and better, why would I keep using the shitty product unless somebody is tightly controlling the market and not allowing any competition?
I was talking to somebody yesterday about how being forced to switch to open source platforms has actually made me somewhat more optimistic for the future in general. Once somebody destroys something you love, it’s just gone. It sucks, but there’s a good chance you’ll probably never get back what was destroyed. You can’t go home again, but you can always try to rebuild something new, and make it a little better than before.
Did they actually build their own alternatives that anybody wanted to use,
Right wingers functionally excluded from major platforms more or less until Musk bought Twitter actually did create their own spaces. Several of which got made functionally inaccessible from mobile devices, or removed from search engines or otherwise actively prevented from growing organically, many of them eventually being quietly put back after any buzz around them had died down. Think Gab, Parler, various .win sites that are reddit-like, etc.
Hell, at one point the largest Mastodon instance was literally one such space that had had it’s own app banned from the app stores for being an uncensored far right space, and then several of the major general Mastodon clients made their clients refuse to connect to that specific instance at the client level as well. If you’ve ever seen a Mastodon client on say the Play store with negative reviews saying that it couldn’t connect to the largest instance, that’s because at the time the largest Mastodon instance was technically Gab.
You absolutely can ban a user from an lemmy instance.
I actually got banned from this community on my old lemm.ee account under the same username. So I don’t make actual posts here. Idk if I’m even technically supposed to be commenting, so 🤫
Even so, Lemmy is nothing like what Reddit has become. Any platform is susceptible, but Reddit is now controlled by people who are out to prove a Fred Phelps like point about free speech. If you can’t say whatever you want, whenever you want, to anyone you want, go out of your way to ruin it for everybody and die miserable and alone.
Even if that does end up happening here, somebody else will just build back something new and a little better to replace it.
Fascists complained for decades about being censored on the internet and in that time what did they actually do? Did they actually build their own alternatives that anybody wanted to use, or did they just scheme and claw their way to the top to take over what somebody else made and force what they wanted on to everyone?
It’s true, they’ve basically made just about every popular internet platform unuseable in like 9 months, but that has also driven more people to just seek alternatives, and other people to focus on building them or making what already exists more user friendly. So when people just stop using that garbage, what happens to all those paid sponsors? Do they just keep paying to advertise to no one?
The dead internet theory just kind of assumes that people will want to keep using these platforms to witness bots argue instead of interacting with other people, but I can’t even really scroll through Reddit or Substack anymore bc I know there’s better content somewhere else that isn’t being controlled to keep a narrative going.
I tried to look for a very specific topic on YouTube yesterday, and got so frustrated with only having an endless stream of short clips of influencers instead of the one thing that I actually wanted, that I ended up just making an account on peertube. There’s not much content on there (yet), but the small amount that is there is sooo much more interesting than 99% of the garbage being force fed by YouTube.
I’m pretty sure that’s actually how capitalism is supposed to work when a “free market” isn’t being completely controlled by oligarchs. Like if this product sucks, and this other product is available and better, why would I keep using the shitty product unless somebody is tightly controlling the market and not allowing any competition?
I was talking to somebody yesterday about how being forced to switch to open source platforms has actually made me somewhat more optimistic for the future in general. Once somebody destroys something you love, it’s just gone. It sucks, but there’s a good chance you’ll probably never get back what was destroyed. You can’t go home again, but you can always try to rebuild something new, and make it a little better than before.
Right wingers functionally excluded from major platforms more or less until Musk bought Twitter actually did create their own spaces. Several of which got made functionally inaccessible from mobile devices, or removed from search engines or otherwise actively prevented from growing organically, many of them eventually being quietly put back after any buzz around them had died down. Think Gab, Parler, various .win sites that are reddit-like, etc.
Hell, at one point the largest Mastodon instance was literally one such space that had had it’s own app banned from the app stores for being an uncensored far right space, and then several of the major general Mastodon clients made their clients refuse to connect to that specific instance at the client level as well. If you’ve ever seen a Mastodon client on say the Play store with negative reviews saying that it couldn’t connect to the largest instance, that’s because at the time the largest Mastodon instance was technically Gab.
Til they come back with hundreds of alts because being banned was such an offense to them.