There always was at least a small contingent of people with this kind of discourse, but as a creeky old timer, i started seeing the change around 2014-2015, when everything seemed to scale up.

I feel a lot of it came from consolidation. In the before times, forums were small, topic-focused, usually separate websites, and the mods either owned the site, or could directly speak to the owner.(its own separate drama, but you could always hop onto another site.

You always had poop throwers and trolls, but each of the poop throwers usually had a specific type or trigger that would set off. The trolls were usually of the kenM variety, where they stirred poop and it was contained to a degree.

I think most importantly, because people were going to a place for a specific topic, it kept people somewhat civil. People with different tastes and opinions came together under a shared interest, and it helped with dialogue.

There were a LOT of downsides. One which doesn’t get addressed enough was that people weren’t as accepting of others being publicly identifiable as LGBTQ+, disabilities or being on the spectrum (those forum sections was often soft- coded as “anime”). And those biases were often baked into these groups. But honestly, today, it seems like the internet is even more segregated than before. While now, everyone is more or less forced onto one of the big socials, they no longer go to “the car forum” or “the tabletop forum”, its the “car forum of a rigid narrow band of political partisan and identity that you have to prove allegiance to or you cannot talk about sparkplugs”.

While I’m happy a lot of folks with differing paths in life can find community online, I wish there were more spaces for cross pollination of those beliefs. And because all these differing threads are under the control of sterile, monoculture corporations with little connection to these forums, admin policy reflects a detached, nuanced free reality where all furrys are porn, POC content is regulated into POC only threads, and grandma’s automatically get shoved in with the alt-right. (I’m in no way calling grannies alt-right, but a LOT of recommendation sites will try to channel them into innocuous looking alt treads, so please protect and inform your grannies)

For now, I’m enjoying Lemmy, but it feels like a distillation of all the issues mentioned. Not only is everything hyper granular , but you can essentially filter everything you don’t like off the island. While that may give a sort of peace of mind, it doesn’t address the issue that theres a bunch of jerks here, or expose those jerks to anti-jerk ways, so lemmy is becoming an even more amplified echo chamber than reddit, but now a user doesn’t even have to know that there’s a mirror-verse of the same threads saying the same things, only filtered through ingroup opinions.

Everyone’s railing against “the snacks” bit, but no one is talking about the “we do not keep anything like this at home”

Dem property taxes!

Please, do not insult crabs. The correct phase is “jerks”.

Does anyone have any good tech- related forums on Lemmy? I’m still digging around as i find a lot of interesting but “Quiet” ones.

There is a nice exhibition on the Moomans at the Brooklyn Library right now, if anyone is interested! https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/celebrate-tove-jansson’s-central-library-dweck-20250809-0100pm

Thank you!!

Thats amazing! Do you have any sources or papers on this temple? (I would love to share with my teacher friends!)

Plug in your phone, you’re at 1%’!

Okay, so let’s put it this way. If the federal govt decided that people could take dumps in Your grandparents garage without asking, you would protest right? And if they said “well, your grandparents don’t live in The house so it shouldn’t be a problem”- it’d be a problem right? And then someone posts the article on here and someone types out a defense “yeah but it’s a garage, its uninhabitable” and then later “WHAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH THIS SHITTY LITTLE ISLAND?” …. You’re getting this right?

Y’all heard of librarians right? They do a little more than stack books. Most are accredited professional researchers who can find what you’re looking for, or try to get it for you.

Talk to more humans and kindly please support your local libraries.

I cant wait for A.r.t - I hope they don’t change it too much. The next seasons might have to nudge up the budget for some of the scenes in the later books to work. Anyone hear about another book coming out?

It’s called a freezer and lunches for the extra. Eat chicken? Batch cook that pallet- brine in about a couple of water, a bouillon cube, garlic and a bunch of salt, parsley, oregano, rosemary (to your taste), and a couple of the cheapest white wine at the grocery store if your feeling fancy or really like gravy. After a few hours or overnight, dry and throw in your oven at 400 for twenty minutes. When its out, let the chicken cool on a cutting board, slice some up and chop up the rest. You now have a baseline chicken that tastes as good as deli-quality that works well in everything from dinners, sandwiches and salads, and if you skip the rosemary, its a good stir fry addin.

Now with extra crow eggs!

Its like taking Amtrak instead of a flight!