Millennials: It's ok to mourn the death of social media

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 449 points –
Millennials: It's ok to mourn the death of social media
businessinsider.com

Millennials: It's ok to mourn the death of social media::Wired writes how "first-gen social media users have nowhere to go." Ouch.

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As someone who was on the internet before social media existed, please let it die in a fire.

Everything now is curated and cultivated by corporations and political entities to weed out any "unacceptable" discourse and content that doesn't support a particular agenda or narrative.

100% agree. I was learning networking and internet coding back when Javascript was new, web 2.0 was going to revolutionize our lives, and Macromedia was releasing a little animation software called Flash. As an elder Millenial I can confidently say that the death of social media would be the absolute best thing that could happen for our society as a whole. The society was not mature enough for it, still aren't. Maybe next time it is invented we will be ready and someone will remember to keep the damn corporations out of it.

TBH I'm right there with you when it comes to wishing corporate social media a fiery demise.

And yet, I'm happily using decentralized/non-profit social media that I'd very much like to see flourish. The thing I don't like about social media today is that it's billionaires selling personal info to people that want to direct advertising or propaganda to intellectually defenseless people, I really think democracy can't withstand the firehose of bullshit that now empowers bad actors to lie at scale that used to require traditional media or state resources.

Were BBSs social media?

They were decentralized. If not federated, definitely connected in many aspects.

I was thinking of standing up an instance of this

https://enigma-bbs.github.io/

Just for friends and family

In of the opinion the term social media needs to be broken into two groups. Ones where you're yourself by name and one's where you're an online handle. The "personal" social media are all garbage, but there's some alright "unpersonal" social media, like Lemmy for example. BBSs would mostly be the later, but probably would be social media if the term existed when they were popular