I'm kind of conflicted on this. On one hand the old Web 1.0 world of interest-oriented niche communities was a lot more decentralised, but having big central platforms where you could reach a much broader audience meant it became feasible to make a living as an independent creative. - ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

orinoxide.bsky.social • 127 days ago

I'm kind of conflicted on this. On one hand the old Web 1.0 world of interest-oriented niche communities was a lot more decentralised, but having big central platforms where you could reach a much broader audience meant it became feasible to make a living as an independent creative.

Reposted from Mike Riverso

The millennial experience is growing up with the internet, and watching it go from a free, open, democratic, and eclectic ecosystem to a wasteland of five websites controlled by billionaires, and now seeing it quickly fill up with AI-generated slop.

I want our World Wide Web back.

Comments

rowdythecrux.dev•127 days ago

The way I see it, we kind of need both, but I think the problem is we *only* seem to have central platforms with huge downsides that people don't really want to explore solutions for

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

The Problem Is, As Always, Billionaires. :|

rowdythecrux.dev•127 days ago

Well kinda, it's also just people not wanting to support smaller platforms over larger ones

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

Given the costs involved in changing networks, I'd say that people who make the jump usually have pretty compelling reasons to do so. If people prefer large platforms over small it must be because they feel small is lacking something important, or large is offering something they value.

coreh.bsky.social•127 days ago

Only a very small fraction of users ever get to make a living as independent content creators. Early in a platform's lifecycle it feels more feasible because these start off subsidized. Once the incentives kick in it becomes a threadmill/race to the bottom, with a long tail of creators losing money

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

Hence "feasible" rather than "easy". It's a numbers game, and access to a bigger potential audience means you can make some kind of income with a lower rate of conversion from "audience" to "paying customers".

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

Like yeah your forum of a few dozen or hundred people was a lively little village, but most of the time there just weren't enough of people there to support the livelihood of more than (at most) a handful of creative workers catering to that forum's interest.

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

The problem is that most people have multiple interests, and there's an opportunity cost in spending time on one interest-specific forum over another. If I'm on Houseplant Forum I'm not on Space Exploration Forum or Furry Art Forum, and I have to make a choice on where I put my attention.

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

Conversely, big central platforms mean you can be in one place but fill your feed with stuff from lots of different interests. So you'd see posts Houseplant Twitter, Space Twitter, Furry Twitter, and so on. The borders are porous, and communities overlap and cross-pollinate. It's exciting!

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

In theory Fediverse stuff looks like a promising blend of both models, with smaller interest-based communities that are part of the wider conversation, but there's still a lot to work out, especially with regard to safeguarding against communities whose shared interest is Being Awful.

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

Basically the Web 1.0 model was fine when most people weren't online - you could muddle along as an enthusiastic amateur. But everyone's online now, and there's huge potential for real harm, so there need to be Standards and Procedures and Accountability, and that stuff's hard. And expensive.

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

I don't really have a solution for any of this, I'm just wary of the yearning to RETVRN to the Good Old Days before social media was a thing. It's a different world now. The internet's a lot bigger, more people are on it, and the old solutions won't work like they used to.

Nostalgia is a trap.

mikeriverso.bsky.social•127 days ago

This is honestly why social media is attractive. It’s just a shame it’s been manipulated by a few corporations with greed as their driving force.

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

Yeah, it was good for a while early on, but when it became The Main Place To Be that gave it a monopoly position, and the inevitable response to that is to leverage market dominance for maximised profits no matter what. :\

cypherwulf.bsky.social•127 days ago

RSS was the solution to this, you could create a feed that was as good or better than what we experience now through socials. The biggest downside RSS had over modern socials was the face that finding new feeds was a little harder.

drunkcrunkfranken.bsky.social•127 days ago

FWIW, there were people that did make it work because Google was actually functional back then and could drive traffic to your site, though that solution's probably not scalable to today's number of people online.

shirosiri.us•127 days ago

I do think there’s a certain amount of nostalgia for the early Internet that doesn’t actually match what it was like

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

I remember enough niche interest communities run by petty tyrants with zero oversight to not get all rose-tinted about that shit.

shirosiri.us•127 days ago

Yeah, this is why I’ve always been a bit “meh” about the “companies controlling social media” thing

It fucking sucks, but also I saw enough cool BBSs get painfully torn apart by personal drama that I’m not entirely sure it’s worse

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

At least with corporate social media they've usually got a dedicated team of people tasked with formulating and enforcing standards of conduct, and there's (notionally) oversight and an appeals process to guard against fuckery.

zekah.justforlulz.fr•124 days ago

But that's also a blessing, because people back then were working in whatever to sustain themselves, and THEN ran and participated in these niche communities by true passion. There is a lot of good coming from making a living off of that, but something changed too... (sponsors, infomercial, ads ect)

orinoxide.bsky.social•124 days ago

I get where you're coming from, in that monetisation distorts creative output towards what's marketable over what's authentic, but true passion alone doesn't pay the bills.

Social media helped a lot of people who can't work a regular job turn "worthless" interests into an income stream.

orinoxide.bsky.social•124 days ago

Ideally we'd have UBI, or failing that, jobs that pay enough for creatives to have spare time and energy for their passion projects.

zekah.justforlulz.fr•124 days ago

Yes! Weirdly I think I'm done about seeing my interests (and other's ones TBH) to be seen as a product, a marketable (or that can be shaped to a marketable) asset to be sold. I'm sorry but ok for the ones that are trying to make a living out of their passions, good for them! But something is missing

zekah.justforlulz.fr•124 days ago

I know, maybe I've been desensitised enough by the content creators who cater to a specific target audience, with sponsorship, VPN offers and policed content that please (or try not to displease) advertisers; that I wish so much the come back to the pizza guy who published stuff because he liked it

renbymon.bsky.social•127 days ago

I really miss when we had platforms like LiveJournal (before they became a privacy nightmare).

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

Yeah, LiveJournal was pretty much the first social media site, all it was really missing (from what I recall) was the ability to boost/share other users' posts.

renbymon.bsky.social•127 days ago

Yeah and that wouldn't have been hard to implement, I think!

One thing it had and NO other social has done; ability to change avatar/icon on each post. That was great!

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

Yeah! They became their own little vernacular so you could tell if someone was using their Angry Rant Avatar or their Special Interest Avatar or whatever. :D And having more avatar slots as a paid feature was a nice little value-add that people didn't mind paying for.

renbymon.bsky.social•127 days ago

I think it's also pretty good for people who are systems or have multiple forms, etc. :)

I had a Permanent account and was happy to have it, but I deleted that when they moved all the servers to Russia.

midblep.bsky.social•124 days ago

This is a very important realisation because it leads into the fact that yes, the Web 1.0 free, decentralised and open internet still exists. But the vast majority of us do not care to fish and find our local forums or tiny communities of individual niches. Because we're all on the big sites.

saiyanhajime.bsky.social•127 days ago

For real.

Same with like, pre Etsy being huge... There was nowhere to make real money online easily from art. That doesn't mean Etsy doesn't suck shit, but I think people romanticise the past.

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

I've not engaged with Etsy as a seller but from what I understand it was good for a while, but then as with many things the shadow of Enshittification crept in and it slowly got worse and worse, because ha ha where else are you going to go?

saiyanhajime.bsky.social•127 days ago

Basically that. It's still way waaaay better than the before times though, when you'd get pennies for art on eBay if you were lucky. Etsy's problems are just a reality matter of scale and success under capitalism.

orinoxide.bsky.social•127 days ago

Yeah, having a specific space for small creatives to sell their wares is great, but from what I've heard Etsy has got more and more grabby with the fees, and aren't very good about dealing with the influx of dropshippers selling mass-produced items (because why would they, it makes them money).