ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝

A geologist and archaeologist by training, a nerd by inclination - books, films, fossils, comics, rocks, games, folklore, and, generally, the rum and uncanny… Let’s have it!

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  • Yrtree.me - it’s still early days for me in the Fediverse, so bear with me
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  • 55 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Good second half too:

    That search/SEO is broken seems to be part of the game plan here.

    It’s probably like Russia burning Moscow against Napoleon and a hell of a privilege Google enjoy with their monopoly.

    I’ve seen people opt for chatGPT/AI precisely because it’s clean, simple and spam free, because it isn’t Google Search.

    And as @caseynewton said … the web is now in managed decline.

    For those of us who like it, it’s up to us to build what we need for ourselves. Big tech has moved on

    That’s why we are all here.

    It’s interesting to think that Big Tech might just move on from the Web, leaving it to us ordinary humans to go back to the way we were doing it in Web 1.0 just with fancier tools at our disposal. I quite like the idea.









  • Unlike the author, I don’t think that the internet is dying, but instead entering a new phase that resembles in some aspects the old internet: search has become unreliable and those mega-platforms enshittify themselves to death, so people shift to smaller (often non-commercial) platforms and find new content to follow by the hyperlinks provided by other people. It’s a lot like the internet before Google Search.

    It is definitely feeling like this is a trend, we are moving back to more curated ways of sharing information.

    The Fediverse feels like a return to the old, open Web before it was captured by Big Tech, just with new bells and whistles attached. With all the enshittification, it seems like it is well-placed to be the solution to the problem. It’s not there yet but it’s a start.


  • We had a bunch of Japanese teenagers run scripts on their computers and half the Fediverse was full of spam. If someone really cared about spamming, this shit wouldn’t stop as quickly.

    The upside of that attack is that instance Admins had to raise their game and now most of the big instances are running anti-spam bots and sharing intelligence. Next time we’ll be able to move quickly and shut it all down, where this time we were rather scrambling to catch up. Then the spammers will evolve their attack and we’ll raise our game again.




  • My feelings exactly. As far as I’m concerned this is what Web 2.0 should have been about - taking the energy and excitement of blogs and forums and federating them together into a collectively owned Fediverse that would have made corporate takeover almost impossible (they would have been forced into the half-assed federating some of them are now promising). Instead, the tech companies moved hard into the territory saying “if you liked that then you’ll love this even more as it’s convenient.” Unfortunately, they have now built the size and momentum that makes it difficult to stop or kill them entirely but that also means they reached the level the level where they felt confident to start enshittification and we’ll be waiting when people can’t take any more and leave. The bonus is it should help filter out a lot of the idiots who are happy in their walled garden.

    I tried the various Web 2.0 offerings and it didn’t feel right. I jumped on dyaspora but it felt like it’s time had yet to come. Web 3.0 turned out to be a grift. So, as I have argued before, I think this is the start of Web 4.0 which will be about openness, collaboration and collectivity.

    I’ll always want new services (I’m waiting on a federated IMDb replacement) and improvements to existing ones (we could really do with a wiki integrated into Lemmy) but I am already enthusiastic about the Fediverse (borderline evangelical sometimes) and I feel like we are building the next phase of the Web providing all the necessary tools for people to build the next great websites.

    As another comment has said, the issue currently seems to be search engines not returning great links and the Fediverse isn’t ranking high in search engine results, yet. Perhaps we need a federated search engine - one you can add custom algorithms to…