It’s about time that people understood that “Everything on the internet lasts forever” is a falsehood formed from a Web 2.0 mindset. Now those big Web 2.0 sites everyone thought would dominate the internet forever are dying, and the only thing saving what was on those websites (the internet archive) is being constantly sued by greedy publishers.
Fun fact, did you know that google deliberately makes their products run worse on browsers like Firefox so users will think the browsers are slow? Please support Firefox, it’s the only real browser not based on Googles technology (like Brave is), and it’s actively fighting Google’s monopoly on web browsing.
I think the issue is more on lack of innovation. People ditched Skype for discord because Discord had many more features and wasn’t an unusable mess like Skype was in the mid 2010s. Lemmy is literally just reddit with a few more features.
I gave it a try when I was going through my “absolute free speech” phase. I thought it was alright for a couple weeks, but after the people from “/r/coontown” came, i started to question my beliefs. Place immediately went to shit.
But what if the thread is old and someone came across it from google looking for information?
Who would believe a story like this?
To a small extent, yes. I kindof felt that when I discovered mastodon 5 years back, but it’s still not quite the same. Back then, the internet was a new adventure. Every website was kindof shitty, but they all had their own unique personalities based on who made them. The internet’s potential was unknown. The fediverse just feels like more of the same bland social media, but everything is messier and hard to find.
I say that, but Lemmy just makes me realize how much I took reddit for granted. Forums are nice, but it was great to have a place where at least 1/5th of the english speaking population congregated to discuss the issues of our time. I don’t think we will get that on the fediverse.
I want to believe in the fediverse, but it REALLY needs to be ironed out and made easier to use.
What we want is our shit in one place, without some asshole controlling what we see. Is that really such an impossible dream?
TL;DR: The lead dev is German and had no idea at the time that toot was American slang for farting, he thought it was just an elephant/mastodon noise.