Mastodon toot:
Daniel Lakeland @dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
Fediverse, the social media system for 40+ year old people who built the world wide web and regret it.
Oct 01, 2026, 11:32 PM
there’s 2 kinds of people on fedi:
40 year olds who remember the good ol days of the interwebs
16 year old queer shitposters who got tired of getting called every slur imaginable on other networks
both are into linux
you forgot the 3rd kind
Russian bots
also into linux
Isn’t that something else? No matter where you are on the planet, if you know technology, you despise Windows.
Always has been.
Well, since 1978 or so.
Almost no one was into Linux back then though
The first version was released in 1991.
Oo-ooh I use Linux just for kicks, now
I’ve been using it since 1996, now
Might be larger now, but I use it still
Not so sure, Putin was spotted voting on a unactivated windows computer (so several of my colleagues told me yesterday, haven’t verified that claim).
dont i remember there were no cables running to the monitor
Was it cake?
It was a lie, that much for sure.
Do Linux Russians also wear fancy socks?
Only secretly!
Luckily it is typically too small to be much of a bot target. I don’t subscribe to world news subs though, dark places.
It’s usually only the news subs. But if you make claims that counter Kremlin propaganda you can sometimes summon them.
Like if I just say Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine, it won’t (why? Beats me). But if I say they are killing ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens as well as Ukrainian men, women, and children, then we have a good chance.
I got others if it doesn’t work.
Edit: (WITNESS ME! Lol) Edit 2: Now I’m impressed. I knew I could do it, I didn’t expect it to work quite so well. I’ll check back in a few hours.
“People disagreeing with me are bots”
If they’re getting paid to do it, they’re just meatbots.
…Do you unironically believe people are getting paid to be on lemmy?
That old cartoon show “Metabots” but they’re people in a computer cave lol
Why you people always gotta take everything as black and white. I use “bot” interchangeably with “shill.”
Edit: I see no one found the humor with switching the actual thing that is black and white in his statement (“Everyone I disagree with”) with the “bot” and “shill” thing.
“shill” implies payment, Lemmy is just way too under the radar for that kind of engagement
And by the time you have shills the network will be drowned in LLMs already. The latter hasn’t happened, it’s pure paranoia to think the former is anything to be concerned with.
the 3rd kind is people too toxic for reddit and got banned
I think you meant to say 40 year old queer shitposters
They’ve got an entire instance!
And that’s just the “nice” one that people still federate with.
i guess im the 4th kind
Queer less than 25 here, I came here not because I was getting called slurs but because I’m tired of companies and of AI, I’m also on Linux :3
I’m 60 and was tired of companies before you were born, AI is just the same shit served on a different cracker, I’m also on Linux :)
Good man(/woman/person/other-identity-that-represents-you)!
Third kind (the only people I know from real life who use the fediverse): Tech/math enthusiasts, usually grad students (who are also into linux)
I’m a Luddite who discovered this shit inadvertently, and still doesn’t actually understand how any of it works
But you’re correct in that I’m pushing 50
Excuse me, I’m not 40 for a few more years yet tyvm!
Where do fifty-something furries fit to this?
In the corner, facing the wall, sweating profusely while they think real hard about their submission/humiliation fetish.
We know all IT departments are primarily composed of furries, so it’s just a branch of number 1 really.
I’m flattered that you think I’m 16 and didn’t just turn double that this month c’:
I am in my mid-30s i will have you know!
I run Arch, btw.
I can be a 40 years old queer friendly tired of being called slurs wanting to go back, with a mindset of a 16 year old…
I feel called out
What about us 20 somethings who vaguely remember the good ol days as they were fading away?
LGBT40+
There are some lost kids wandering around complaining about their moms…
I dunno how they found it into here.
complaining about their +70 year old mom
Oh I can do that, this woman sits in her chair all day watching right wing youtube and complaining about her failing health. God forbid she take a walk or get a hobby!
The great thing about the Internet is that people can just find stuff, often by accident.
Well, people used to be able to do that. Nowadays, IDK…
I accidentally stumbled upon the Wikipedia article about Sad Clowns when I was looking for that picture of the happy/sad face from theater.
I have mixed feelings about what I read today. :|
The primary issue is: not anymore.
you leave my muddah out 'o this!
I found myself in comparable spaces for the time too. Spend enough time online and you hear about things.
Not 40, but also don’t want my thoughts and comments to be an income stream for a for-profit organization, whether that be by selling my data for profit, training an LLM with my data, or contributing to an inescapable network effect that can be increasingly monetized by various means.
The modern social media platform is not designed to foster positive interactions, but rather to maximize shareholder value.
also don’t want my thoughts and comments to be an income stream for a for-profit organization
I mean, you’re fooling yourself if you don’t believe Lemmy has been scrapped by a thousand crawlers by now.
I’m more paranoid about how many accounts are bots than about some data aggregator getting my dumbshit hot takes as training data.
Equal access for all is still better than one company controlling access to my content for the purposes of monetization.
I mean, you’re fooling yourself if you don’t believe Lemmy has been scrapped by a thousand crawlers by now.
That’s why we’re here. To fu k with the scrapers and poison the training 🙃
Coming here for discussion and meme dopamine, Lemmy still has that intact. Reddit has killed it with bots, ads, and some heavy duty corporate lean on things.
r/castiron, dominated by Lodge Corpo as one example. Other “suggestions”, too early in the day to recall more names right now, are in a parrot circle of replies for brands, as above.
You can’t trust it as much, which is why, in part, people are here instead. More old, old Reddit feels, you know, before it became cool and was thus inevitably ruined.
Fuck that. I don’t regret it. We built the world wide web from nothing for everyone and had it fucking stolen by rich assholes who put our community resources WE developed behind ads and paywalls. Unlike those uncreative hacks we have the talent to take it back.
I don’t regret it. I only regret letting the corporations stake their claim without greater pushback.
The slow creep was real. Social media corporations brought the mainstream to the internet in the worst possible way, but the old internet was still alive in forums and chats and discussion groups that had been around for years.
Reddit destroyed it. It gathered everyone into one place. It was constantly growing and pulled users from everywhere else in the internet to one place. Centralization. Then, it inevitably went corpo to the point that the greed of the ones on top destroyed the communities they gathered and exploited to put themselves in their elevated positions of wealth.
To be clear, the people with the money don’t care at all. They cashed out and got theirs. Everything burns around their greed, no different from oil companies.
The internet was supposed to connect everyone, share ideas, connect the world to collective knowledge, and bring us all together. Instead, it became a tool of corporatist and fascist control. Reddit ultimately ended up being the corpo that crushed and scattered the opposition.
Social media corporations brought the mainstream to the internet in the worst possible way
Eloquently said.
A decent chunk of local businesses don’t have a web presence besides Meta products. Meta would love to be “the internet”, they had a project in early 2010’s to give free “internet” in developing countries. The catch, the internet received was restricted to Facebook. It was called out by net neutrality advocates as being very anticompetitive and India rejected the project in 2016. Even a decade ago the zucc had been using underhanded tactics to put as many eyes on his propaganda machines.
Why should some jackass amass as much wealth as a nation state by siphoning pennies from every other interaction on the planet?
Link to BBC article about India rejecting free internet below.
India blocks Zuckerberg’s free net app Published
- 8 February 2016
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35522899
… launched in 2013 as Internet.org and was offered in 36 countries - had brought more than 19 million people online …
Surprised there are no video essays on how reddit destoryed the internet
“The best time to join the fediverse is 10 years ago, second best time is today.”
Wayne Gretzky- Michael Scott
When Facebook came around, I immediately saw what it would lead to. Hell, just the thought of sharing your personal details for anyone and everyone to read was extremely creepy to me. Any time I tried to communicate this to people asking me why I wasn’t on Facebook it achieved nothing. Pushback was useless, people want what they perceive as “convenience” even when they have to (almost literally) sell their souls to the machine. No, I don’t think pushback would have helped, because people want these - and I shudder to call them such - services. The Internet was doomed the day it became mainstream.
When I was young, I was called a nerd for using computers. People online were primarily nerds who cared about tech. Those days are long gone, and there was nothing that could’ve been done to prevent the rot. It was inevitable as the Internet became more popular.
The masses will always be asses. They don’t care. They will eat corporate slop and ask for seconds until their bloated corpses burst. The best we can do is create alternative infrastructures and wait with horror as they start to rot too.
Jesus, I think I’m having a bit of a blue day.
Yep. That is the regret.
Unfortunately as a younger gen z i need to supplement my Fediversing with traditional social media unless i want to have humor of a previous generation and get obliterated at school. I wish there was a greater variety of people on here
Nah, join the dark side. There will soon be a day when you can’t understand the young ones anyway. Why not today?
Wrong
67 skibidi rizz
Bring them here, we promise not to be awkward!
Speak for yourself I promise to be awkward as daisy dukes on a crusty old fart with droopy balls.
We shall bring the weird gen Z here so they can “match your freak” as the kids say these days.
I’ve been here for three years. Weirdest Z in the gen.
I’m from the 40+ demographic but also weird and I don’t think it’s really about age or generation. I don’t care about how you reached this particular stage of enlightenment; all that matters is if you’re on the fediverse, y’all are my people.
Older gen z here, doing my part
I’m 22 but i kinda like the vibes of here.
Cool. Can I buy some of your blood?
I eat plastic to feel young.
This isn’t the corporate web, donate blood, don’t sell it.
Or pirate it.
You wouldn’t download a blood… oh, wait
nevermind.
Op can I buy your blood and then we give imgonnaregretthis a pail full of sheep mucus. We can split the money and the leftover lymph 60:40
Huh? I’m just trying to find the comm I can’t remember cuz it pinned what to do, like I gotta find/remember quick, whether you keep it cold or warm, I know it depends, you got the link?
Bring your friends
Good. Glad you like the place.
And 30+ year old people who enjoyed the good times while they lasted and are now nostalgic?
We’re definitely here too
Jip :D
at 31 i barely caught the tail end of Good Internet Days but i sure fuckin miss it
If we unite, we can regret it again.
That was my first thought. If we believe in ourselves we can fill Lemmy with ads and make it a subscription service and sell everyone’s data to the lowest bidder. We can do it!
im gonna gift you Lemmy Plutonium for this!
By your powers combined, I am captain shitpost:
I would say I like it here, imo the format and overall technology is perfect. I am always impressed by how little battery and data voyager uses compared to all the other bloated apps on my phone.
Having said that, I am disappointed that even without feeds and algorithms, it has become a lot more rage inducing and depressing then I would have hoped for.
There is just so many things that affect my life in a negative way being shown here, can’t a guy get a little ignorant bliss about nerdy topics? Or long, deep discussions comparing the philosophies of niche hobbies?
Yea tbh it’s kinda a struggle to find hobby communities
Turns out finding a niche in an already niche community is kinda hard
What hobby community do you want to see here?
Scale model building?(tbh havent even looked yet) equivalents to the AskScienceFiction and WhoWouldWin subreddits
I agree. After being here for a while, I realized that my feed is always depressing and negative, and the comments and discussions are as well, to the point where I pretty much stopped using Lemmy for a while. But I guess the solution is simply to seek out other communities that are more positive - there should be plenty to choose from :)
I think it is kinda the same ‘echo chamber’ problem that other social media has - I feel my own opinions are being reinforced to the extreme, and while I am glad to be with like-minded people, it is also very exhausting.
Anyway, time to go exploring new communities!
I find the discussions on Lemmy to be better quality than on Reddit, but that can also make them heavier. I can also find Reddit’s banality depressing. I’m still using both atm but I’m in the process of phasing reddit out and I’m fine with that, even if I browse Lemmy a bit differently.
Building a well-rounded community can take time.
I have so many filters just to block depressing news… Also to block strange hive mind posts about beans etc.
That’s one thing you can do here that you (no longer) can on Reddit
Agree. But I do have a extremely long block list of communities that I find that seem to be all about news are negative shit or click bait. Lots of users and a fair about if keywords.
I figured if it’s going to make me feel like shit why not just have my feed never show me it again.
I’ll be back within a day, you’d better have your topic of conversation prepared!
Was thinking of making a post about movies which have reception of being worse than the book by the general public that was better than the book in your opinion.
Ok my answer is going to be a little disappointing, but I thought about it for a bit and here’s what I can say…
Usually I read a book or I watch a film, I don’t think I’ve ever done both for the same story. Sometimes there is no equivalent book or film, and when there is, I personally just end up choosing whatever format my gut says to try.
If I’ve imagined a universe and story in my mind (from a book), or had the experience delivered to me (in a film), I don’t want them to conflict so I just choose one. Probably because I see so many debates about this online and I’m just like, “nah I’m not getting involved”.
I’m actually probably the worst qualified person to give an opinion on that!! But I recognize I’m probably a weirdo, as I don’t even watch film trailers or read the synopsis of books before I read/watch them. I just kinda hear about it however that happens, and decide to either skip or jump in. The exception to this being non-fiction or educational stuff, then it matters a bit more.
I guess, I just wanna enjoy (or dislike) a story and leave it at that.
Sorry for the total non-answer. But now you’ve got me curious, what’s your answer? Maybe I’ll make an exception for Grandwolf319 haha
Yes, bow to me, the grand architect of geocities Dragon Ball Z pages.
Lemmy feels very gen z ish though.
That was so unexpected that I misread it and made a joke about gen x. We seem that young to you?
We are young 🥺
Like, young at heart or young enough to trust a fart?
Heartache to heartache, we stand. No promises, no demands. Love is a battlefield.
Now im gonna hear that song in my head all day
Which is nice
Will you set the world on fire?
Oh yes we are young! And since no less than 40 years! ^^
I was spending 12 hours a day staring at screen all the way back in the 90s. It was just a 14inch CRT not a phone screen. I was Gen z before Gen z was even born.
No it doesn’t. The only active fandom community here is for Star Trek, people quote George Carlin so much that it’s made me hate bits I used to find uproarious, and it generally has a curmudgeonly feel to it.
It’s Gen X for sure.
I’m gen Z and I like trek
deleted by creator
Did we build the world wide web or did we just shitpost for the lulz for decades without realizing we gave all the benefits of our shitposting to Mark Zuckerberg?
I personally blame the iPhone. Shit all started going downhill from then
Honestly really glad, I’m tired of reading teenager opinions everywhere on the Internet
Joke’s on you: my opinions are just as bad.
Yeah? Well I also have shit opinions.
I think mine are the best there is. I do have a problem with objective judgment though
I think mine are the best there is.
Likelihood of teenager.
I do have a problem with objective judgment though
Evidence of self-awareness, personal reflection, and confidence enough to admit personal shortcomings: Definitely not a teenager.
D’oh 😖
Plenty of old people with stupid takes too
I still want to read bad takes, that’s not the issue here
Our current crop of old people sucks badly. I aim to grow wise and notmerely grow old
:old-man-yells-at-clouds-meme:
So my opinions are automatically worthless just because I’m 19?
Sadly that’s how some people think
Sadly, yes.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that age automatically makes one wise, but yes, inexperience does automatically make one naïve.
I didn’t say that, me not wanting to read them doesn’t make them worthless
minors not being listened to/having autonomy is the foundation of most things wrong with this world :(
I think a lot of you are projecting, lol
I love young people. My volunteer little sister just graduated and I used to work with trafficking victims. Listening to young people one-on-one is important and rewarding, I hope for both of us.
Reading a hasty thought from someone who doesn’t even know who they are yet every 30 seconds on the Internet on websites like reddit, where people skew really young, and taking that extremely seriously is not enjoyable, for adults or for them. And unfortunately, whatever stupid thing people say gets preserved on the Internet for WAY too long, all the more reason to disregard it quickly, but people really struggle with that online.
I’ve fucking known who I am since I was 12, no one would accept it or believe me or give me bodily autonomy or let me learn actually useful things instead of religion at school, or let me not wear religious and gender invalidating clothing
I’m really sorry you went through that
😑
Agreed
Strong claim
You can debate me on it if you like…
