I am maybe misplaced in this conversation. I was born in 1990. I do feel a deep nostalgia for early chat rooms and IRC. So much so that I’m trying to build up a chat platform of my own.
In comparison to the time of asking people their A/S/L and just hanging out talking about how our lives are different, there are now maybe four (or five?) categories of potentially society-ending threats hanging around our cultural zeitgeist. All of them addressable, but it just hangs around every internet thread like a miasma now.
But I do think we’ll find ourselves nostalgic for this time in a similar way that we look back on the 80’s. In the same way it became possible in the mid 70’s to just buy some off-the-shelf components and assemble them into personal computers that can be sold en masse, it is every year more and more possible for a relative novice (such as myself) to do something like create their own chat room app. With some prior experience and the help of AI, I’ve got the bare bones of a shift-left style DevSecOps stack, and it feels really exciting. It feels like I’m a guy in the 70’s in his garage putting a prototype personal computer together, the way you can abstract your requirements from deployed resources in CI/CD. I envision a near future where corporate capitalistic social media becomes stale and increasingly awful (status quo) and the average consumer can have an idea for an app and have a fully hardened back end system to support it in the span of an afternoon. I’m looking forward to a new crop of communication technologies that we collectively develop as a people to tackle the overarching issues which affect us all. Imagine if we could all organize to efficiently locate ideal candidates for public office and democratically work out our differences in environments where peaceful debate and separate chill zones are both encouraged, rather than profit-driven systems where outrage is king. We can do so much better, and we are just now on the cusp of having all the tools to enable the average person to finally be able to help themselves.
I’m sorry for the tangent, and for polluting this thread with all of this. I know it’s not really on topic, I’m just waiting for tests to process and really pumped up about starting a revolution later, idk, maybe, I mean, like only if you feel like revolting.
Yeah, there is a lot to miss about those days. Seems naive looking back to not have known that those early-net vibes could not last.
I subscribed to a writing magazine in the late 90s or so and they had a web forum. It was amazing to be able to post my writing online and get feedback from a community of people who were virtually always friendly (if sometimes blunt) and dedicated to the craft. I miss that genuine feeling of community, seeing the same pool of people around you so often that you notice when someone’s been gone a while.
It can’t be the same now for a lot of reasons, but I agree that Lemmy and its Fediverse counterparts (I’ve only been on Lemmy) are the closest thing we have now. And having recently looked in on the alternative, I just notice reddit getting worse and worse and Lemmy getting better and better.
We should enjoy this time when this world is small. And welcome the refugees as they arrive. Would love for the people to own the means of production, but at this point I will be thrilled if the people can at least come together and seize control of the means of meme production.