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.
This is a fundamentally flawed take on this issue, internet is NOT a product, it is a platform where product (content) is hosted, or a platform where other platform is hosted which in turn hosts other products (content).
When was the last time you saw an ad for McDonald’s Big Mac™ or LFS Aquarium’s hang in the back fish tank pump on Steam? You don’t.
That’s because there are infinitely many different ways to run a business on the internet, and as a platform the internet does not inherently require you to go one specific way or the other. Yet they chose mass ads and search engine manipulation that augment mass ads because it is the most cost effective way to maximize profit at the detriment of the entire ecosystem.
The culture that on the internet you do not expect to make direct monetary transactions, in order to have access to anything on the internet at all is NOT the problem, rather the problem is a culture of endlessly and infinitely maximizing profit no matter what it takes. And this culture had a chance to lead to wide scale actions that are fundamentally ditremental to the entire internet because the internet was made into a capitalism heaven with practically no regulations at all, the only thing that keeps capitalism in check.