Well, that escalated quickly. Or not so quickly. Looking at my post from 20 years ago, if you had told me just how much shittier the Internet would become, I wouldn't have believed you. There's a proverb that the web mainly consists of five websites, each full of screenshots and reposts of the other four, and it's not far from the truth. Social media brought us a social web usable by anyone, just as we imagined it in the 90's, but it didn't bring the democratization of knowledge, the social spaces for every interest or affliction or the intercultural dialogue we craved. Instead people get stalked, measured and monetized in every interaction. The mainstream on the web is moving from clickbait to ragebait, people are thrown into echo chambers algorithmically instead of building their own filter bubbles, which was bad enough. Elections are decided by which demographic is being "activated" more by outrage porn, outright lies and partisan media coverage.

Frankly, I'm not as depressed as all this might sound. I've given up on most social media, left Facebook a decade or so ago, many other sites like K5, G+ or Multiply have disappeared, while other formerly nice or interesting places like Reddit have been enshittified beyond recognition. I am on LinkedIn for business reasons (and it has actually helped me when looking for new jobs), but I really hate how it is full of trivial shit and business monkeys who know nothing about anything but are LinkedIn voices for everything. But I digress.

I really miss the nerdy places, where you can have a good old-fashioned discussion about technology, society, politics and everything else, like we used to have here in the early 2000's. Tough, but interesting. Clearly positioned, but willing to listen, at least sometimes. In a tone that wasn't friendly, but not unfriendly either, at least most of the times. The trolls who were part of the community anyways. Practicing the Zen of Trolling oneself, when that still meant subtly shifting a discussion to places that made people realize something, not just farming outrage. There was that, too, but the nerds usually ignored it. Unless somebody was on the wrong side of the vi/emacs divide.

So I mostly stopped using social media, but I noticed that I started writing about society, technology and politics on LinkedIn, which is the worst place for that, and I found I just miss having a good discussion and read something really *interesting* once in a while instead of all this forgettable bullshit people call "content" nowadays. So I joined Mastodon in December 2023, and I really like it. Also, it doesn't have an algorithm, so there's only "organic" growth - people only see your content if somebody they follow boosts it or they follow you. That makes Mastodon mostly uninteresting for today's "content creators" and "brands", because they cannot pay their way into your feed, and they cannot advertise. It's heaven. Actually interesting people posting actually interesting stuff and actually having discussions. You know, as in exchanging points of view. I like it, and I encourage you to join us. Starting on mastodon.social as an instance is fine. You can take your account and followers to another server whenever you want, it's built into the protocol.

There is a renaissance of the personal website, there are ways of having new social places that cannot be invaded by advertising and monetization through the Fediverse. People are having enough and at least *try* to escape the enshittified hellscape the net has become. I don't think this will be a mass phenomenon (let's see my journal entry here in 10 years), but at least there are places again that are free in the ways people want them to be free. That makes me happy, and it makes me hopeful that the current tech empires, too, will fall one day and we can have a say in what comes next. It won't be perfect, but it will be *way* better than what we have.

I guess that almost none of the old folks are here any more, but I needed to get this out of my system anyways. Feel free to chime in with your feelings and impressions, I'd enjoy that.

You should know better than to click onto this.

here: http://bit.ly/d5s7z4

SCNR. And NSFW for those who aren't supposed to slack at work.

Geez. Today I'm on the net for ten years, and I don't know what to say. If you knew me better, you'd know why this is actually hilarious.

Time to write a book, isn't it? I had 240.000 readers on CompuServe at a time when there were only around 600.000 users in Germany. I have been recognized by strangers while shopping groceries who wanted to talk about the stuff I wrote. I make a living off the net for 7 years. I've got lots of stories to tell.

How long have you people been online? Do you feel this, too?