Spacebattles is still alive.

Nexusmods “forums” and pages still have some social activity.

TBH it’s pretty barren. I noticed that even comment sections are drying up.

Yeah, so many projects and companies using Discord for support seemed like such a bad idea.

Thing is it’s kinda too late, and the, uh, “commercial net” has all but taken over society.

Whatever happens, it would be nice if that part burns down. And I think yanking the techies from the space with the Fediverse will help.

At risk of rambling… It feels like attention spans have shortened, too.

https://www.axios.com/2024/11/29/gen-z-kids-reading-tv-songs

People don’t want to dig through long discussions and documentation, they want a quick fix in a YouTube Short, or for it to be fed to them shooting the breeze in Discord.

And this sorta works short term, until the “old” information well those shorter systems rely on dries up.

It’s already a serious problem in newer topics. I’m part of the “localllama” community, for instance, and it feels like any central organization of knowledge has completely collapsed, and there is no old info to fall back on because everything is so new.

Anything anti billionaire, to sum it up.

Yeah, well, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok are not the net, they are siloes. Discord too. Even Reddit is trying as hard as it can to be insular.

Much of my family doesn’t even know how to use a browser, at least not beyond the bare minimum for work. They probably never will.

I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.l, and their devices.

Discord is scary popular though, like Facebook popular. I am really scared the enshittification will stick hard, like it has for Facebook.

let the world burn

That’s what’s gonna happen.

Maybe Europe and China will “isolate” themselves from much of the burning. I hope they do. But the rest of the world seems quite entrenched in Big Tech.

Maybe burning quickly is better, since more people will notice.

You mean drag them from platforms that have a vested interest in keeping them locked in and squashing competitors like the Fediverse?

In platforms that spend billions on engagement optimization algorithms, with the sole purpose of keeping users addicted, basically with government and business landscape backing?

Look, I’m optimistic about the Fediverse, this is a great refuge in the hellscape that is the internet. But you can’t make people want to change. I’ve learned this IRL, but see it with (for example) persecuted people continuing to use Twitter even though its owner basically has a gun to their heads. There’s a big gulf between being a fantastic refuge and taking the internet from Facebook and Google. Even if every phone on the planet had an easy button to switch to Fediverse alternatives in one click… many would not take it, and that’s an utter fantasy.

Or Matrix?

According to history:

• Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable, or…

• If it reaches a critical mass… You can’t. See: Facebook.

The Fediverse can adopt a few nice communities, but honestly bringing the larger population seems hopeless.

Today. Among thousands of times.

I’m with OP. People have been screaming this for ages, and the collective societal reaction hasn’t even been apathy, but “We vote for Big Tech CEOs, full steam ahead.”

So… Yeah, I’m tired, too. Screw it all. Let the internet burn in Reddit/Discord/SEO hell. Maybe we can build something from the ashes.

Ugh, Discord is an information black hole. I despise how so many of my niches have fled there.

Reddit seems to be trying to destroy that “role” of theirs as hard as they can though. A few very niche subs I follow are drying from some kind of “bug” that deprioritizes their discoverability.

It’s not a bug. It’s absolutely a feature for making Reddit more generic, farmable garbage and noise.

I’m sympathetic.

But… What exactly would you use them for? Spam detection would be quite expensive, in other cases it’s basically a writing assistant for a human response.

There are totally open efforts like IBM Granite. Not sure what is SOTA these days.

There are some diffusion models like that too.

Problem is there’s a performance cost, and since LLMs are so finicky and hard to run, they’re not very popular so far.

Apache opens weights is good enough for many cases. Sometimes the training stack is open too, with only data being the morally dubious closed part.

Yep.

I feel the fediverse should lean towards “overly aggressive” when combatting spam, before it takes root, even with all the negatives that brings.