The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.
It’s a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I’ve noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.
I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.
The problem with centralized social media is it replaced all aspects of free speach and public opinion with algorithms that keep you hooked while all your personal information is being sold and given away. It doesn’t have to be that way. Learn about free software, what it means, it’s history, and it’s impact on the world today. Learn about the fediverse. Most importantly, don’t expect things to change if you don’t. https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software
I am sure most people on lemmy are already familiar of FSF and Libre Software, I suspect most of them are linux users.
Its the majority of the non tech and lurker folks who have come to other social media who mindlessly consume content without any interaction that has converted the Internet to the cable TV which it was trying to replace as the primary form of entertainment.
They might know about free software’s corporate term “open source”, but surprisingly, most lemmy users are actually unaware of free software as they often confuse it with the corporate whitewash of open source. As for your claim, yes, I also do believe most lemmy users already use GNU+Linux, but it’s also important to go further than that by actually understanding the importance of software freedom to not only use free software, but also contribute to it in addition to teaching. Most people just stop at using another os and some free software, but it’s important to go down the more radical path by replacing all non-free software, using a fully free distribution like parabola, using a fully free bios like GNU Boot, and using ryf hardware.