I think fediverse users are on average much older than other social medias. I often see polls on mastodon and the most prominent groups are very often the 35-45 year olds. I feel like im in the minority of my age (19) caring about free software and it makes me sad that nowadays tech has to be so dumbed down because even the young can’t use computers just like my grand parents. It’s crazy how my classes most people only knew how to open instagram, but they had no clue how to save a word document
You might be right. I’m new here but so far I’m amused and surprised by the amount of ‘classic’ memes going around.
I think for many of us in the mid 30s early 40s it boils down to having experienced a version of the Internet where content was king, not personality. Anyone could get their website out there but it was what you put in it that mattered, not who put it there (unless you were an actual celebrity). You could bump into all sorts of new information just by clicking from link to link. Then we saw and experienced first hand the rise of the search algorithms, the echo chambers, click bait and the cult to fluff that social media became pretty much since the beginning.
The Internet we have now is certainly shinnier but only the way plastic is. When I look at the information being churned out and that gets passed around more often I can only think about it in terms of pollution. The equivalent of styrofoam pellets being manufactured for single immediate use that cover the information sphere and that just end up making people’s life worse in the long term. Twitter, Meta and the like (none holds a candle to TikTok though) are no different from the factories that have been spilling poison down the drain for decades. The latter pollute our physical space, the first pollute our emotional an mental environments.
I honestly don’t think I’m being a grumpy old fart (though I am). This is the reason I preferred reddit a while ago and why I now came here. It sort of feels like those days when ‘browsing’ was about stepping out of your own world experience and into completely different ones.
Honestly, I think we have better content nowadays, but said content is harder and harder to find. At the same time, said content probably gets more and more viewership as well.
I feel like if I was born in the 90s, I would’ve killed to have content like Kurtzgesagt or LinusTechTips or Wendover or NileRed or Adam Ragusea etc etc. Although you had your Bill Nyes and Mythbusters and whatnot, there couldn’t have been a way to make high-quality content without the resources and reach that a platform like YouTube offers today.
You’re not alone. Most people I know don’t even sort their files into directories anymore, they just search for it (particularly in cloud storages like Google Drive).
In fact, when I took the introductory computer engineering course at my HS, the teacher made everyone sort their Google Drive files as an assignment.
I completely lost control of my folder structure after keeping all my old backups (before i had a network storage) on HDDs and later copying them over as Backup-Pc-X, Backup-Pc-Y, etc. I should clean up since years. But hey, so far the search worked :D
That I can understand. I have a folder on desktop I dump everything into that’s loose to sweep under the rug. Desktop23. Desktop22, etc. And these folders go back years on my external drive. They will not be organized ever.
But I have the feeling you understand where things are supposed to go. The people I’m talking about have zero idea what’s in thier computer.
I have been ill this year and as I am pretty limited in what I can do, I am finally sorting stuff properly. It is just that I usually don’t delete anything. Every time I change a device I dump stuff based on file type on folders either on cloud, device or external HDD thinking I will come back to it. Instead, I never come back. And because of my work, a bunch of stuff is pretty depressive so sorting a decade of files and images I would want to forget feels impossible. But I am making a dent.
But only in comparison to the good apps. If we never had the others we’d never know and Reddit might never have gotten big. Those apps drove a much higher rate of engagement because of well they were made. It’s like now I couldn’t even engage at the same rate if I tried. And I’m only talking about viewing posts, commenting, and voting. I can’t imagine how the changes are for mods.
Yes, we would know. Because reddit itself used to look good before they destroyed the UI. Take a look at old.reddit.com to see. A lot of these apps were mostly trying to recapture that, but with more user customization.
You’re missing the point. (And old reddit sucks too, it’s always been about RES+imagus). I mean that if we only ever had an official shitty app, reddit would never be what it became, it would still be a third rate aggregator. My opinion is that Reddit’s success was due in no small part to the quality of the unofficial apps especially for power users and mods.
I was already using the official Reddit app, and I own being dumb as a brick.
But I still decided to leave because of the IPO, which will unavoidably make the site cater more and more to a mainstream audience until it eventually turns to shit. I call it the Instagramification of all social media.
That’s why I joined and now I’m thoroughly enjoying it here.
Honestly I just jumped to Lemmy after dndmemes sent me this way and it feels like I’m delving into early internet forums back in the day, fresh and new and full of excitement for the future
Fresh optimism for the communities and the new apps all being furiously worked on right now. I’ve got Memmy, Mlem, and Voyager all installed currently and watching the rapid development of each is a hell of a lot more interesting than the one Reddit app that’s been dogshit since they bought it and stuffed it full of ads and is only getting worse.
I should just probably try them all but do you have a preferred one so far? Currently using Memmy but honestly I finally dove back into something like this after a proper year without Reddit, to see how this community is doing and to see what the vibe is like.
Remember when forums would let you put unsanitized HTML in your signature and people exploited it to flood them with pop ups and redirects? Lemmy’s bringing that back, too!
I was on a forum looking for something once and someone had a flash game as their sig. It was like Portal The Flash Version but the gun was on a rail. And the dimensions of the flash viewport were like a typical sig, so it was pretty interesting just to play a game in such a strange aspect ratio. Not really relevant to anything but I haven’t thought of that in a really long time.
Lemmy DID support HTML and iframes sometime ago. The devs scrapped it for security reasons and I hear they are planning to bring it back in future after making sure it is secure enough to use.
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