Is this what the internet felt like?

https://lemmy.world/post/209814

Is this what the internet felt like? - Lemmy.world

I’ve been exploring the fediverse and subbing and posting all over the damn place. Realizing lemmy can federate with kbin blew my mind. Not to mention the possibility of turning my old laptop into a personal server to host my own instance. Is this what it felt like to discover how the internet worked in the 90s?

I think this is the thing that made me stay on Lemmy and don't look back on Reddit. I'd imagine that the federation is not a totally new concept, but since i discovered it i'm feeling just like when i discovered the internet when i was 5 years old, i posted more here in the last 5 days than what i used to post on reddit in a year.

Could you speak more about how your experience with Lemmy has brought back those feelings? I remember the sense of wonder I felt when browsing the web in the early '00s, when every personal website, php board and irc community was unique and discovering a new website/community was really exciting. I still feel this sense of wonder when I visit content-rich websites from that era, such as amasci.com, https://atlas.limsi.fr/ and https://sciencemadness.org/talk/.

What I've seen from Lemmy brings me back to the early years of Reddit, but I'm yet to find anything that really brings back the way I felt when I started browsing the web. But maybe I just haven't explored enough?

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The whole fediverse thing is what really takes me back to my first days on the internet, because after some years, the way the internet works in general became common knowledge, so nothing felt new, or the things that were really new, were actually just stupid concepts (Take for example NFTs that rised in popularity last year, people said it would change the future and the way the internet works, but it actually was just a dumb pyramid scheme and it led to nothing, even to this day i have no idea how it works.)

But the federation is a genuinely interesting system that is different from everything i've seen in the past years. The concept of anyone hosting conglomerates of communities in their own house or even in a dedicated server, while all those instances communicate with eachother is mind boggling for me, and the fact that none of this is owned by a company truly reinforces the feeling of community. The fediverse feels like a part of the internet that is yet to be explored, and while i don't understand it completely, there's still much to learn and discover. Browsing through Lemmy doesn't feel just like a daily dopamine rush activity just like Reddit, it genuinely feels like i'm interacting, contributing and being part of it, something i haven't felt for a long time tbh.

The feeling of ownership, of oh I can go host an instance at home and knowing that you aren't at the whim of corporate admins or a company's poor fortune, is so incredibly cool. I really hope more decentralized/selfhostable alternatives to major services start to take off.