The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.
It’s a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I’ve noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.
I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.
The small communities are still there, you just don’t visit them because you are on social media (like lemmy). Forums are still there. IRC is still there. Hell, even BBS and Usenet is still there if you really want to go that way.
I would not consider Lemmy social media. Forums are few and far between, IRC is barely still kicking and Usenet (as it was) simply doesn’t exist.
I was curious about Usenet awhile ago, was it still linked computers mirroring information like the old days? No, it more or less simply linked usenet providers at this point.
IRC is as active as it has always been. It was never a high throughput system, you can barely keep track of more than 5 people talking.
Forums are still kicking as well, you have car owner forums for basically any make and model, Hobby Forums, specialist Forums (house building kitchen or gardening just to name a few I consulted recently).
Yeah, they don’t have the scale of Facebook, they never had.
And lemmy, reddit, Mastodon and Co are very much social media. What are they if not?
Lemmy isn’t social. It’s just forums aggregated. One could use it as a social app, and some people do, but it really is not necessary or even really welcomed.
I have seen estimates of a reduction of 50 to 75 percent in the number of forums over the last 15 years. There are certainly a lot less. People go to reddit or discord these days.
Same with IRC but the decline is even higher.
I’d love to see the methodology for those estimates, because I see more every year, not less. IRC stays flat.
Go look at the major irc chat hosts. Add up daily users. Then compare that number to the estimated users in 2005-10.
They are similar.
Yeah but honestly who uses Usenet anymore if not to download binaries.
Approximately the same amount of people as 30 years ago. It’s only that now they are a tiny part of the internet, dwarved by TikTok and Facebook.
What is UseNet ?
Internet history. An old protocol originally for discussion, nowadays also to sail the seven seas, if you know what I mean. It predates the web by more than a decade.
Also you could go to a niche technical forum and find some of the planet’s bes specialists of the material. For computing, you’d often see the people that built everything (from software to hardware). It was truly a world forum at a level that things like Twitter never got close to.