Don’t want to date myself, but finding new sites and communities used to be fun.

Are there any cool sites anymore? Besides this one, of course?

  • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    9 days ago

    Na I get what you mean. The novelty of the internet is pretty warn thin at this point. Used to be things to tinker with, but APIs worth their time are dried up because of AI. That Web2 promise of open data to build cool things with is gone.

    Small projects get quickly overrun with attention that it can cripple them or they instantly become shit with ads and paywalls.

    You’re not hanging out in WoW barons chat anymore because that game has jumped 100 sharks at this point. You used to get into a Wailing Caverns run for 4 hours with 5 people and end up a member of a guild with a Mumble server that you could join at any hour of the day and find someone online.

    Web comics and sites would have attached PHPBB forms with their own communities. The authors are in there sometimes and its cozy and fun. But those people host gaming conventions for multi billion dollar mega corporations now and you can’t afford or don’t have the time to go to anymore. Any site opening now already has a subreddit likely run by “fans” and its a little nightmare place that gets either to little traction or the site its about doesn’t even know it exists.

    You’d join an art site to post silly drawings on and consume others drawings. Get in a little drama with some furry who was just trying to be themselves online because at home they can’t. Now that furry is a highly paid independent tech contractor with a $30,000 fur suit and you both would probably vibe now, but the art site is basically dead and over run with AI nonsense.

    No one is hanging out and doing weird shit on second life any more. The meta verse killed any remaining interest in virtual escapism and you realize now second life was just rife with capitalist demands and property ownership, and didn’t dare to imagen a world any differently then our own. Sure people made cool stuff but the best stuff was owned by someone else and they commissioned it from a designer, and it was all off limits to you because of private property existing in our little VR game.

    You don’t put something online anymore you open a small business and run small business ads and hope your little site gets bought out so you can build a little bigger site and move up to being a medium business doing medium business ads.

    Everyone has a podcast but half of them are dead feeds that haven’t been updated in over a year. If you download an episode it’ll bake in current targeted ads.

    You used to check dozens of sites every day, now you close your tabs from the one website you visit regularly and instinctually open a new tab to the same site only to realize nothing has changed because its only been 5 minutes since you ran the feed dry.

    You and your extended family would share photos with each other and catch up on each others lives through innocuous social feed, but those feeds cooked their brains and you don’t use those sites anymore and haven’t really talked to your extended family in a while as a result.

    Everything is just incredibly siloed now, the basic niche existence was destroyed by the gigantic generalization and consolidation of those niches. Everything has a subreddit for better or for worse. Half of them are dead. Search is a wasteland of sponsored links. Discovery means less traction on the core services. Dead internet theory is at it’s highest stage yet. Nothing is new or novel. Every service is trying to be a one stop platform. All the platforms are becoming homogeneous. Its monopoly capitalism at it’s finest.

    At least we have Hexbear.

    • alexei_1917 [any]@hexbear.net
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      9 days ago

      You get yourself banned from one of those massive platforms and lose access to a shit ton of communities that don’t have an equivalent elsewhere.

      • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        9 days ago

        Yeah that’s they other end of centralization and it blows. That’s why I really enjoy my time on Lemmy. I think people are doing it wrong with the general instances though. They should be making them around niches (politics is a niche so Hexbear and Grad are doing it right). Maybe I’m wrong. I like the idea of the ttrpg instance, or a gaming instance, or an art instance, or an instance for a podcast or a web comic, an instance for a wow guild, an instance for a region (west coast, east coast, Midwest, etc). Everyone wants to be Reddit, but the hexbear model, where admins control community creation is way more akin to the old PHPBB model.

        • alexei_1917 [any]@hexbear.net
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          8 days ago

          Yeah, I do definitely like that. I mean, yes, piles of different instances means different rules everywhere and often having to have more accounts than I want to keep track of… but I did definitely pick Hexbear for my first experience with this type of website because it’s an explicitly leftist instance and the less authoritarian leftists like to scream that it’s full of tankies, and, well, that’s exactly what I’d wanted. This kind of decentralisation is… rather appealing to anarchist types both left and right, and I don’t really like them - some ancoms are perfectly fine to organise with, most you meet online are sectarian bastards not worth arguing with.

          I do enjoy that no matter where I am on this site and whether the comm in question is explicitly political, I can trust no one’s gonna be angry with me for saying something too far left. So while I do like the idea of a different site for every large enough niche, I also like the idea of Hexbear or Lemmygrad or something like this as a place for all sorts of communities, political and otherwise, just, y’know, explicitly leftist. The communities where on any other site you’d have to be cautious when politics comes up, here you can just straight up call imperialism what it is and blame capitalism for the problems that capitalism causes. Which we need, when so much of the Internet, especially the Anglosphere internet, is explicitly the opposite.

    • SevenSkalls [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 days ago

      This makes me miss old forums and all their weird little niches.

      I’m off to watch that Internet song by Bo Burnham again and feel the stinging pain of a lost internet that will never come back.

    • i_drink_bleach [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      9 days ago

      You don’t put something online anymore you open a small business and run small business

      Nah. I’ve always been a shitposting fuckwad asshole. No blogs, no facebook, no twitter, just some douchebag that shows up to be snarky. Don’t get me twisted though: I love you all. Hexbear is my people.

      I absolutely put things online. But given the current “political” climate, my aggressively anonymous nature is not unexpected. I have no interest in it being tracked back to me or my family, especially given that palantir exists. I’ll maintain my 80’s-style “hacker” anonymity.

      Your very identity is now a weapon that will be used against you. Do with that what you will.

    • Rey_McSriff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 days ago

      Web comics and sites would have attached PHPBB forms with their own communities. The authors are in there sometimes and its cozy and fun. But those people host gaming conventions for multi billion dollar mega corporations now and you can’t afford or don’t have the time to go to anymore.

      Fellow Penny Arcade forum enjoyer?