Yeah, you’re not wrong. I definitely don’t think it is a fediverse-only problem. Something changed culturally between Usenet and the things that came after.
I was thinking about this earlier today: There was a wonderful little renaissance that happened around the time of the Napster / Slashdot / flash game era, when “it’s the internet so of course it is awful” was in abeyance for a little bit of time and things were cool (as well as being pretty creative, and generally sensible.) I think a lot of what I’m upset about here is not so much that people are being catty (as you said, that’s just kind of the nature of the beast), but that it’s so disconnected from reality. People will say wild made-up nonsense and then other people will take it seriously. Of course, yes, that’s not exactly new or a fedi specific problem…
Skiluros@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Oh man, this brings me.
Remember the time in the late 90s and early 2000s when even a niche topics had like 3-4 large community sites with active forums. More popular topics could easily have like 10-20 communities.
And there was a lot of drama both within and between communities.
It’s kind sad that we lost this, although lemmy is solid modern alternative, just needs much more users. Enough users for even niche topics to have multiple active communities with their spin/focus on a given topics.
On the plus side, I am glad I got to experience the early pre-corporate internet. It was good times.
kudra@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I’ve seen people say that Farcebork was like being in a small town, actively making that kind of everyone-knowing-everyone’s-business a reality again for communities fractured by urban anonymity.
But that was there in spades in the early internet, it’s just that normies hadn’t been beaten over the head by social conditioning by the corporate overlords yet to join in.
It’s human nature to think and behave tribally. So we should expect it to continue in the Fediverse, we just can’t shove the problem over to someone else to manage and take their tithe in eyeballs, and thus fracture our communities all over again: we have to do it ourselves. Drama fucking sucks, wherever is found, but we have to accept it’s our job to manage if we don’t want to trade our freedom for a padded cell.