It certainly feels nostalgic to me being on here. I miss the days of webrings and message boards and just crawling ever forward into unknown new places. I was a kid then though, so I thought it was just me becoming wiser/more tech-savvy. Now I realize how freaky all the consolidation is. Even some video game modding communities now have more of a presence on reddit than anywhere else. It's convenient but so weird.

I agree with u/Pelicanen that it feels like the uncertain times of the early internet where things were hosted by individuals and their really small websites. I don't know to what extent it will catch on (although Discord is huge with milleninals/Gen Z, no?) but it's interesting to imagine a world where the internet is primarily large consumer/business-facing websites and then highly decentralized communities.

Wasn't web3 about everything being under control of a handful of mega corps that own everything? So more like web4 then.

I'm enjoying the lemmy.world experience, and I believe decentralised social networking could be the future. I am a refugee from Reddit and hopeful there is hope for a open, community focused platform.

As for this platform, I am apprehensive about somebody running the server I have my account with having the power to remove my account and my posts, but I guess this is true of any network in existence.

My concern in the long run is who pays for the hardware and energy costs even if it is federated. Without some kind of reliable funding model who will pay the bills?

Hopeful for many enjoyable encounters in the Fediverse.

The crypto side of web3 definitely felt way more "consumerist minded" with the way wallets were able to connect to multiple websites(exchanges) in order to "buy" things(alt/shitcoins). But federated social media feels like a much better use of decentralization so far.

I do not like using Web3 to refer to federated platforms. Indeed, Web3 is strongly associated with blockchains, cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

Yeah I feel the same too. And I think decentralization is the only way to web3.

Distributed networks are very very complex to make. But decentralized networks have the simplicity and features of centralized networks with the addition of freedom that distributed networks give.

The best of both worlds really.

I've been arguing for more decentralization for a long time now and have been shifting as much of my usage to self hosted services as possible over the past few years. I'm glad to see others picking up the cause. <3

Related: https://web3isgoinggreat.com

yeah, i love this new paradigm. i don't understand it but i hope it'll lead to a better experience with cool usability features later on. hopefully a good buffer against evil & suits & etc

i love how post URLs have numbers now. you can get dubs and trips!

I mean I definitely agree that this feels great, but decentralization and federation is what pure Bitcoin and crypto are all about. In many ways this community reminds me of the good vibes and great minds the early days of cryptocurrency discovery encouraged. This predated some of the corruption, VCs, and crypto bros that came around in 2013 during the first boom.

I still think that early soul of empowerment and community is there in Bitcoin itself but you gotta dig a little deeper to find it. I expect Lemmy will also “commercialize” to some extent in coming years, but it’ll always be better than Reddit and other centralized platforms that want to feature gate and censor unfairly.