I’m talking about what they say at 8:20:
Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The main difference to today was twofold:
For one there were no algorithms fighting to keep you online at any cost – at some point you were done with the internet for the day, as mind blowing as this may sound.
But more importantly: The old internet was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages gathering around shared beliefs and interests.
These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains. These communities worked because they mirrored real life much more than social media:
Each village had its own culture and set of rules. Maybe one community was into rough humour and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned easily.
If you didn’t play by the village rules, you would be banned – or you could just go and move to another village that suited you better.
So instead of all of us gathering in one place, overwhelming our brains at a townsquare that in the end just leads to us going insane, one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple:
go back to smaller online communities.
The Fediverse just gives a path, it doesn’t restrict the paths. Anyone can make or join any community.
You could say the same about facebook groups or reddit. As long as you have an account on the platform, you can interact with any community on the platform. That’s not separation.
They were talking about the early days, where you had to make an account for every different forum or community you joined and there was basically no interaction between those different forums.
No, those are closed systems. You can’t start your own Facebook instance, you can launch a server with a lemmy instance.
But that’s just the technical aspect of how the site infrastucture works. Unless you’re someone that exclusivly browses the local feed, the fact there are multiple instances has little impact on the user expirence.
The point in the video was, that you used to only interact with people in a single community. Like, you were on a forum for a specific game and you talked with people about that game, usually not knowing much else about them. So you lived in the same village.
On today’s social media platforms, including the fediverse, that’s not really the case. I can interact with you in a forum about a game … and then see you post some political opinion in another community we share … and suddenly you’re no longer just in my village, but you’re also a member of the rival tribe.
I am subscribed to several different instances of lemmy and I go to all of them through LW all sorted by new.
You mean you have accounts on different instances? I guess that is kind of a workaround that avoid the problem in the video. Then, you could just as easily make a separate facebook account for each group you join. But I don’t think that’s how most people will use it.
No, I just use my LW account, but I could make other accounts if I wanted to. I could use Mastodon or any other service to browse the Fediverse with.
I guess they meant community rather than instances