Mastodon toot:
Daniel Lakeland @dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
Fediverse, the social media system for 40+ year old people who built the world wide web and regret it.
Oct 01, 2026, 11:32 PM
there’s 2 kinds of people on fedi:
40 year olds who remember the good ol days of the interwebs
16 year old queer shitposters who got tired of getting called every slur imaginable on other networks
both are into linux
you forgot the 3rd kind
Russian bots
also into linux
Isn’t that something else? No matter where you are on the planet, if you know technology, you despise Windows.
Always has been.
Well, since 1978 or so.
Almost no one was into Linux back then though
Not so sure, Putin was spotted voting on a unactivated windows computer (so several of my colleagues told me yesterday, haven’t verified that claim).
dont i remember there were no cables running to the monitor
Was it cake?
It was a lie, that much for sure.
Do Linux Russians also wear fancy socks?
Only secretly!
Luckily it is typically too small to be much of a bot target. I don’t subscribe to world news subs though, dark places.
It’s usually only the news subs. But if you make claims that counter Kremlin propaganda you can sometimes summon them.
Like if I just say Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine, it won’t (why? Beats me). But if I say they are killing ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens as well as Ukrainian men, women, and children, then we have a good chance.
I got others if it doesn’t work.
Edit: (WITNESS ME! Lol) Edit 2: Now I’m impressed. I knew I could do it, I didn’t expect it to work quite so well. I’ll check back in a few hours.
“People disagreeing with me are bots”
If they’re getting paid to do it, they’re just meatbots.
…Do you unironically believe people are getting paid to be on lemmy?
That old cartoon show “Metabots” but they’re people in a computer cave lol
Why you people always gotta take everything as black and white. I use “bot” interchangeably with “shill.”
Edit: I see no one found the humor with switching the actual thing that is black and white in his statement (“Everyone I disagree with”) with the “bot” and “shill” thing.
“shill” implies payment, Lemmy is just way too under the radar for that kind of engagement
And by the time you have shills the network will be drowned in LLMs already. The latter hasn’t happened, it’s pure paranoia to think the former is anything to be concerned with.
the 3rd kind is people too toxic for reddit and got banned
They’ve got an entire instance!
And that’s just the “nice” one that people still federate with.
I think you meant to say 40 year old queer shitposters
i guess im the 4th kind
Queer less than 25 here, I came here not because I was getting called slurs but because I’m tired of companies and of AI, I’m also on Linux :3
I’m 60 and was tired of companies before you were born, AI is just the same shit served on a different cracker, I’m also on Linux :)
Good man(/woman/person/other-identity-that-represents-you)!
I have to use Windows at work now, which is ass.
Anyway, I had a question about how to achieve something in Powershell the other day, so I asked it on Mastodon. Got basically nothing in response.
Every time I ask how to do something in Linux I get swamped with responses.
Make of that what you will.
I use powershell on linux, it’s on AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/powershell
I write scripts on my linux machine then run them on windows workstations
I thought I was alone!
LGBT40+
Third kind (the only people I know from real life who use the fediverse): Tech/math enthusiasts, usually grad students (who are also into linux)
What about us 20 somethings who vaguely remember the good ol days as they were fading away?
I’m a Luddite who discovered this shit inadvertently, and still doesn’t actually understand how any of it works
But you’re correct in that I’m pushing 50
I can be a 40 years old queer friendly tired of being called slurs wanting to go back, with a mindset of a 16 year old…
Excuse me, I’m not 40 for a few more years yet tyvm!
I am in my mid-30s i will have you know!
I run Arch, btw.
I’m flattered that you think I’m 16 and didn’t just turn double that this month c’:
Where do fifty-something furries fit to this?
In the corner, facing the wall, sweating profusely while they think real hard about their submission/humiliation fetish.
We know all IT departments are primarily composed of furries, so it’s just a branch of number 1 really.
I feel called out
Fuck that. I don’t regret it. We built the world wide web from nothing for everyone and had it fucking stolen by rich assholes who put our community resources WE developed behind ads and paywalls. Unlike those uncreative hacks we have the talent to take it back.
I can’t understate how much I love this art
I think you mean overstate? Otherwise you’re saying that you don’t really like it at all.
Yeah, overstate. But I will still leave the comment unedited
It’s ok, we overstood you. But yeah, pmjv is a fucking genius.
What did I do this time?!
Me 😉
Don’t you remember?
lel!
Accurate.
Ditto
Team sport 😬
Uhhh Go Team !!! (insert hey mickey gif) lol
Go Sports!
I’m going with cuck porn on this one
But not too big a team, it gets ruined once you get too big
🥦😎
Ditto.
sensual pottery scene
Hahaha
sensual pottery scene
Would that be a male or female version?
I winced.
Is your back giving you trouble, too?
I’m 39 and 3 months, thankyouverymuch, so I DO NOT fit the demographic!
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
not accurate
Yes, bow to me, the grand architect of geocities Dragon Ball Z pages.
Come now, at least half of Mastodon/*key users are genderqueer twentysomethings who are mind-bogglingly good with computers.
Im sorry but I did not contribute to this in any meaningful way.
There are some lost kids wandering around complaining about their moms…
I dunno how they found it into here.
complaining about their +70 year old mom
Oh I can do that, this woman sits in her chair all day watching right wing youtube and complaining about her failing health. God forbid she take a walk or get a hobby!
The great thing about the Internet is that people can just find stuff, often by accident.
Well, people used to be able to do that. Nowadays, IDK…
I accidentally stumbled upon the Wikipedia article about Sad Clowns when I was looking for that picture of the happy/sad face from theater.
I have mixed feelings about what I read today. :|
The primary issue is: not anymore.
you leave my muddah out 'o this!
I found myself in comparable spaces for the time too. Spend enough time online and you hear about things.
I personally blame the iPhone. Shit all started going downhill from then
Not 40, but also don’t want my thoughts and comments to be an income stream for a for-profit organization, whether that be by selling my data for profit, training an LLM with my data, or contributing to an inescapable network effect that can be increasingly monetized by various means.
The modern social media platform is not designed to foster positive interactions, but rather to maximize shareholder value.
also don’t want my thoughts and comments to be an income stream for a for-profit organization
I mean, you’re fooling yourself if you don’t believe Lemmy has been scrapped by a thousand crawlers by now.
I’m more paranoid about how many accounts are bots than about some data aggregator getting my dumbshit hot takes as training data.
Equal access for all is still better than one company controlling access to my content for the purposes of monetization.
I mean, you’re fooling yourself if you don’t believe Lemmy has been scrapped by a thousand crawlers by now.
That’s why we’re here. To fu k with the scrapers and poison the training 🙃
Dw, the corpos are using bots to scrape and categorize your thoughts and comments anyway.
They will be able to interact with a nearly identical fully formed person, at any point of development for them, who they can make and unmake at a whim, modify, and so on. While they leave the real people to just die.
Coming here for discussion and meme dopamine, Lemmy still has that intact. Reddit has killed it with bots, ads, and some heavy duty corporate lean on things.
r/castiron, dominated by Lodge Corpo as one example. Other “suggestions”, too early in the day to recall more names right now, are in a parrot circle of replies for brands, as above.
You can’t trust it as much, which is why, in part, people are here instead. More old, old Reddit feels, you know, before it became cool and was thus inevitably ruined.
don’t want my thoughts and comments to be an income stream for a for-profit organization
(…)
The modern social media platform is not designed to foster positive interactions, but rather to maximize shareholder value.
This is so much more important than whatever elitism OOP implies.
I’m also not 40 btw.
Unfortunately as a younger gen z i need to supplement my Fediversing with traditional social media unless i want to have humor of a previous generation and get obliterated at school. I wish there was a greater variety of people on here
Nah, join the dark side. There will soon be a day when you can’t understand the young ones anyway. Why not today?
Bring them here, we promise not to be awkward!
Speak for yourself I promise to be awkward as daisy dukes on a crusty old fart with droopy balls.
We shall bring the weird gen Z here so they can “match your freak” as the kids say these days.
I’ve been here for three years. Weirdest Z in the gen.
I’m from the 40+ demographic but also weird and I don’t think it’s really about age or generation. I don’t care about how you reached this particular stage of enlightenment; all that matters is if you’re on the fediverse, y’all are my people.
Older gen z here, doing my part
Never thought I would say we need to decentralize the Internet
I’m 22 but i kinda like the vibes of here.
Cool. Can I buy some of your blood?
I eat plastic to feel young.
This isn’t the corporate web, donate blood, don’t sell it.
Or pirate it.
You wouldn’t download a blood… oh, wait
nevermind.
Op can I buy your blood and then we give imgonnaregretthis a pail full of sheep mucus. We can split the money and the leftover lymph 60:40
Huh? I’m just trying to find the comm I can’t remember cuz it pinned what to do, like I gotta find/remember quick, whether you keep it cold or warm, I know it depends, you got the link?
Bring your friends
Good. Glad you like the place.
I don’t regret it. I only regret letting the corporations stake their claim without greater pushback.
The slow creep was real. Social media corporations brought the mainstream to the internet in the worst possible way, but the old internet was still alive in forums and chats and discussion groups that had been around for years.
Reddit destroyed it. It gathered everyone into one place. It was constantly growing and pulled users from everywhere else in the internet to one place. Centralization. Then, it inevitably went corpo to the point that the greed of the ones on top destroyed the communities they gathered and exploited to put themselves in their elevated positions of wealth.
To be clear, the people with the money don’t care at all. They cashed out and got theirs. Everything burns around their greed, no different from oil companies.
The internet was supposed to connect everyone, share ideas, connect the world to collective knowledge, and bring us all together. Instead, it became a tool of corporatist and fascist control. Reddit ultimately ended up being the corpo that crushed and scattered the opposition.
Social media corporations brought the mainstream to the internet in the worst possible way
Eloquently said.
A decent chunk of local businesses don’t have a web presence besides Meta products. Meta would love to be “the internet”, they had a project in early 2010’s to give free “internet” in developing countries. The catch, the internet received was restricted to Facebook. It was called out by net neutrality advocates as being very anticompetitive and India rejected the project in 2016. Even a decade ago the zucc had been using underhanded tactics to put as many eyes on his propaganda machines.
Why should some jackass amass as much wealth as a nation state by siphoning pennies from every other interaction on the planet?
Link to BBC article about India rejecting free internet below.
India blocks Zuckerberg’s free net app Published
- 8 February 2016
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35522899
… launched in 2013 as Internet.org and was offered in 36 countries - had brought more than 19 million people online …
Surprised there are no video essays on how reddit destoryed the internet
“The best time to join the fediverse is 10 years ago, second best time is today.”
Wayne Gretzky- Michael Scott
- aizakku
When Facebook came around, I immediately saw what it would lead to. Hell, just the thought of sharing your personal details for anyone and everyone to read was extremely creepy to me. Any time I tried to communicate this to people asking me why I wasn’t on Facebook it achieved nothing. Pushback was useless, people want what they perceive as “convenience” even when they have to (almost literally) sell their souls to the machine. No, I don’t think pushback would have helped, because people want these - and I shudder to call them such - services. The Internet was doomed the day it became mainstream.
When I was young, I was called a nerd for using computers. People online were primarily nerds who cared about tech. Those days are long gone, and there was nothing that could’ve been done to prevent the rot. It was inevitable as the Internet became more popular.
The masses will always be asses. They don’t care. They will eat corporate slop and ask for seconds until their bloated corpses burst. The best we can do is create alternative infrastructures and wait with horror as they start to rot too.
Jesus, I think I’m having a bit of a blue day.
Yep. That is the regret.
And 30+ year old people who enjoyed the good times while they lasted and are now nostalgic?
