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.
I agree the internet feels a lot different than the eqrly 2000s, but breaking down what’s different I can’t pin anything concrete down.
There’s pretty much no fundamental differences between how social media was and how it is now. People talk, share interests, get in arguments. What we feel is nostalgia for a wild west internet with less people and rules that will never exist again.
More people use the internet now so more people participate in the conversation. That’s how it will be for the rest of human history probably.
One big difference is scale. The 2000s Internet was primarily centered around single(ish) interest forums with relatively low user counts. The entire Lemmy-verse, which is itself quite tiny in 2025, is still WAY larger than nearly any of the 2000s era forums ever were.
Another other big difference is why the user base is online. The majority of them aren’t participating to discuss a shared interest anymore, they are doing it for general entertainment or to earn money.
Those two things explain nearly all of the change. Way more users congregated into a handful of websites with many of them, including the sites, attempting to get rich doing it.
The 2000s web was a much smaller number of users spread across a zillion websites / forums with nearly all of the users and site operators doing it without money as a motivator.