Alt-text:
I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.
Like... if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you're a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.
The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.
| just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success... I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.
Reminds me of last week when everyone was talking about how Bluesky is worthless because it's just going to go the way of Twitter. And I'm like, Twitter was a good thing for like 15 years.
If Bluesky follows that same pattern, great.
Twitter was never a good thing, AND I was never a Twitter user so i can actually say that.
like it actually did permanent damage to our culture
See, I was going to say that Twitter was a bad thing for 15 years.
I feel an adjacent thing about Lemmy — The conversations I most value are ones I used to have on Reddit, but dwindled over the years, as Reddit discourse degraded. Something that's notable is that, on Reddit, the last bastions of meaningful discussion were the little niche subs, indicating that quality of discussion may be inversely correlated with the size of a community.
The federated nature of Lemmy makes it far more resistant to Reddit's fate, but I still feel a sense of inevitability that there is a timer on how long this can last. (Speaking as an aging punk), it reminds me of what happened to Punk: it went mainstream, and thus less punk. Some people have the instinct of gatekeeping a thing to preserve it, but everything needs fresh blood, and some of the people who discover punk via the mainstream are have a heart as punk as anyone I've met — we can't exclude the masses of "normies" without excluding these people too. In the end, I see that punk is probably dead, but the "true punk spirit" is alive and well, having moved into spaces that were less visible to the mainstream. Similarly, I expect that I'll always be able to find online clusters of cool nerds to have meaningful conversations with, because even if Lemmy dies a slow death, they will find (or build) a new space.
Ultimately, the inevitable temporariness of Lemmy (and other platforms like Bluesky) is quite a beautiful thing for me, because it forces me to be more mindful of the moment I'm in, and how, despite the world being shit in many ways, here is something that I am really glad I get to be a part of
Leave it to the Internet to be the best (and worst) of all.
I'm at best a poser punk but the diy ethos always rung true. That said one of my favourite places online is a local old school punk forum. It's niche enough that with its own problems there's still a community.
In my experience that's kind of what an online community needs to be. Not exclusive, but niche enough. I too used to be on Reddit, got there when the great Digg migration happened. Those days it was small enough to have have a community on some subreddits. Gradually it got the point that when I'd read the article or had a reasonable thought about the question there were 11000 replies and anything worthwhile was already said.
These days Lemmy feels kinda similar to the old Reddit. Maybe things stay the same or maybe they change and there'll be another place I log on.
All that said, what OP posted is profound. What you posted is too.
Hell, the drama right now about the devs running out of funds and people refusing to donate because of their association with .ml might accelerate lemmy's demise before it can even get big.
One of the reasons reactionary content tends to endure and progressive content fails (in Western countries, anyway) stems from the far-right having deeper pockets and a far more pliant creative base.
You don't see Tucker Carlson or Candice Owens ever really going away, because they've got these sugar daddies that always pony up. The fucking Adelsons will keep shoveling naked antisemites money, just so long as they toe the economic orthodoxy.
Meanwhile, Lemmy admins associating with Lemmy developers is unforgivable, because the OG developers won't let you say "I hope someone murders Xi Jinping with a rusty spoon" on their bespoke instance without getting banned.
That's beautiful.
I feel like the concern with Bluesky is that Bluesky could enshitify much faster than Twitter, in part because market conditions push for a faster path to profitablity.
Yeah, I won't claim Twitter was great, but it was widely considered too good (to its users) to be profitable. That was possible during that early investor optimism when the internet was still new, but I also don't see that happening now anymore.
A social media platform needs to decouple from the typical company structure and democratize its improvement, otherwise investors will necessarily make it as bad as they can without immediately losing all users.