This morning, I had free time. As usual, opened my Apollo app, only to be greeted by the loud reminder that I am cut off from the community I have lurked, posted and lurked in almost a decade.
Days, even weeks before Apollo closed, KBin, Tildes, Mastodon and lemmy have been the talk of reddit. The fediverse is trending and just for the heck of it, I applied to lemmy.ml and vlemmy.net. My account wasn’t approved on vlemmy.net for days and only recently did my lemmy.ml account was approved, only to discover they don’t allow the creation of new communities.
I searched around and discovered lemmy.world. The sign up was painless, just like in reddit. As soon as I signed in I was able to create a community and started browsing right away.
As this day came to a close few more things jumped at me.
- The posts may be fewer but the quality and length is higher.
- The people I interacted with are more than helpful, positive and kind.
- No karma points
- The collective unity behind scorning the corporatization of the greater net.
As I browsed and scrolled, and discovered communities, I am reminded yet again of the bygone days of old, when the internet was young. When everyone had geocities website and phpbb forums.
Here, everyone is making the community into a digital home, built on ideals of a freer more independent internet. Here I felt something that I haven’t felt in a long time. And maybe it is nostalgia or maybe just a post trauma from the drama that is reddit.
But as I mindlessly scroll through the post here, I say to myself, this could be a good home. And truly, I am home.
Good day fellow lemmies. And thank you for reading through my long winded rant. I just want to express how happy I am to have discovered this place.
In time, may this grow into a friendlier, kinder reddit. And in time, may it surpass what it wasn’t intended to replace but took on the responsibility anyway; a testament to the enduring resilience of our love for all things free- an internet of the people, for the people and by the people.
I remember the countless days I've spent on traditional forums back then (particularly Gamespot and niche forums like Dissidia-Forums).
The internet did feel freer back then. And it's a little sad that I haven't felt that same sense of freedom for so long. For the past decade, the corpo-fication of every major social media just highlighted how much we needed platforms built for and by the users; platforms built for discussions and not merely for content consumption and advertiser-friendliness.
I'm glad I made the move, and I hope the fediverse continues to grow in the right direction.
Freer true. But isolated and less archival. Some forums tend to just disappear without a trace and some are hard to find (though I guess the directories and web rings back then have this mitigated.)
Still with the fediverse, I am hopeful that much of these concerns would be slowly addressed. And with the influx of users catapulting the platform to a more mainstream one, more and more issues would come to light and be easily stomped out.
As is frequently said, we’re just in the “growing pains” phase after all. :)