That yellow background is so unreadable 🍌

Tech companies were only favorable to their users during the corporate Web 2.0 genesis when these companies had to lure educated users in with extremely convenient free services, but they always did and continue to do so under terms of service that are intentionally made as hard to read walls of legalese bullshit, so they always click accept and hand them power by moving there.

These companies usually are either publicly traded or aspire to be publicly traded, and are backed by venture capital loaned to them by banks and investors.

Then during the late 2000s and early 2010s these corporations gobbled up web traffic by having all the valuable information and communities behind their walls. This drove their operating costs up a lot but it was no problem, since the zero interest rate policy was in effect so these now-megacorps had basically interest-free loans to get infinite money to finance the platform. However they realized around the mid 2010s that they controlled the vast majority of the web so they realized they could be as greedy as they wanted since no one is going to ever step up to them (YouTube is a shining example of this) and ever since the mid-late 2010s they started nerfing and crippling the user experience in order to please their investors and ad networks. This process was extremely slow initially to minimize the backlash. They applied the boiling frog strategy and it worked.

By the early 2020s this was in full effect: websites do not respect your privacy and try to shove trackers and ads whenever and wherever they legally can, search engines are manipulated to put sponsored and SEO spam links first rather than useful answers, sites are implementing login walls to make sure the valuable content they hold hostage can only be accessed once they have the data of users, discourse is being controlled and micromanaged by corporations with automated censorship, mystery echo chamber algorithms, shadowbans and wordlists, news sites have article limits and paywalls now. It got so bad that it's already harming society as a whole because it's causing polarization and these platforms now have enough power to theoretically manipulate elections in some really bad cases.

This is a process known as enshittification: start great then become shit and die. Now that the zero interest rate policy is over, and interest rates started climbing up it means silicon valley free money is over so they can no longer afford to be boiling frogs, they are turning up the heat to 11 and just roasting the frog alive. In other words, the enshittification cycle is becoming exponentially faster and it's only going to get worse for the corporate web and its users. The only solution is returning to decentralized technologies like Web 1.0 used to be, but it's extremely hard since free as in you pay with your data services are addictive like crack cocaine.

Sadly I don't think so. This incident was absolutely preventable. Someone warned them about this and they got fired. A makeshift vessel that wasn't inspected/certified, immersed to almost 3 times the rated depth, controlled by a wireless Logitech gamepad from 2010 with no redundancy and only 96 hours of oxygen. I really really hope for a last minute miracle though...

It makes me hopeful for the future. Enthusiasts priming the pump for people embracing a more sustainable and less exploitative business model to organize the Internet. Instead of putting all the information on a big centralized locked down platform we share the load and costs between instances.

I love what is happening now, it is pretty much the biggest display of resistance against big tech I've ever seen in my life by a long shot. I've seen most of the internet gradually decay to a shadow of its former self so this is a return to form and a switch to a better model in the long run.

People are finally adopting the Fediverse and if the adoption rates keep up we might start going mainstream with all the advantages and disadvantages, but it will be alright since Lemmy is both federated and FLOSS. Lemmy is a Rust-based, AGPLv3 platform and that means it will be protected against corruption in the foreseable future, I hope.

EDIT: Over 30% of Reddit already went dark!

It shouldn't. Karma encourages the vices we've seen on Reddit like karma farmers, hive minds and threads full of unfunny jokes.

Thank you so much! Let's make sure the XMPP situation never repeats ever again.

this feels like what Web 2.0 should have been: the advanced version of user-run platforms with decentralization added in, rather than the adternet and enshittification trap venture capital backed platforms that lure people in and then downgrade quality of life.

This is pretty much the alternate timeline of Reddit. Community driven link aggregators do replace forums, but they stay decentralized and not corporate run

They already crippled the mobile site years ago and put login walls from a long while ago, way before the pandemic. old.reddit.com was the only thing that let me skip it. They deserve to die out.

Good, I hope it crashes and burns. They forgot their origins.

Imagine you have a bunch of island countries. Each country needs to communicate with other countries for several affairs and to trade. A network connection is a route where boats transit back and forth between two said countries with people and things. The location of each island is encoded with a unique address, called an IP (Internet Protocol) address. The thing is, each country also has a huge, massive amount of different sea ports. A big amount of them. To be precise, 65536 different ones.

Each port number is associated with a service or a city that benefits from said sea traffic and expects boats. So to send a boat from one country to another, you need to send that boat from a specific port to a specific port in country (IP address). For example, port 80 is Website City in Google Land. You need to google something / send and receive boats with cargo (your search query). You have to send a boat from your own port 80 (Firefox Town) to Google Land (IP address of a Google server)'s own port 80 which is located in Website City.

Each network connection is a series of sea trips between cities.

Move all the information here and run power delete suite on you reddit accounts while you still can with links to join-lemmy.org, I think that will hurt them quite a bit.

It's been ruined.

I second this, powermods are cancer.

I bet you are reading this message right now from another instance

Hell yeah, reading from a Lemmy instance :D
Fediverse sure is great

One more grifter preying on young men has fallen. This is a nice day.

Also 666th upvote

wait why did they defederate us?

Alien Blue is the pre-enshittification official Reddit app right?

Soulseek is very much alive, try there. But please try to share your stuff too.

a duty to keep these spaces active Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.

I thought it was private property lmao. Conversation spaces shouldn't act as public plazas when they're private.

No more VC free money + enshittification