Corporations found out you can make money on the internet and social media consolidated the internet ecosystem.

Everything got enshitified to increase shareholder value.

To oversimplify a complex multifaceted question: money went online. Pre-2000s and early 2000s was dominated by self-hosted community sites, like forums. It was often a personal sacrifice to host them, rather than a business like with modern social media platforms like reddit, YouTube, etc.

I’ve often preferred to stick away from the middle of the internet, the smaller community sites are so much better than for-profit grifter-filled addiction machines. When I see a few people (less of them now) saying “Lemmy is too slow/dead”, I think about the sites I love that get 10 posts a week. One particular board occasionally has some new kiddo arriving to a thread and asking a question to (or getting annoyed at) a post made over 10 years ago. And since these aren’t sites dedicated to sharing things that other people make, they develop their own cultures. Anyone there to advertise and make money will leave dimeless, anyone there to insert political propaganda will be ignored or laughed at and banned.

Lemmy has some shared traits, and some of the benefits are glaringly apparent when we compare to reddit, but it’s still largely a content sharing site more than a creative community.

In the beginning, we were weirdos doing it for fun. It was a hobby. Now there’s a bunch of people trying to make a living from content generation. It’s a job.

Seemed like there was always some stand out video or event ranging from chocolate rain video, nyan cat, amazing horse, I like turtles, why does the Internet seem so stale lately?

Youtube algorithms preferring to show you legacy news sites and paid influencers instead of promoting regular users.

All the good stuff still exists (and there is more of it, in fact). But it is no longer the mainstream. The popular discourse is always around what is happening on the major platforms, but there is constantly great creativity happening over at Neocities and MakerTube, just to name a couple platforms. Hell, even YouTube and TikTok have amazing stuff happening on them. It’s just not the top-viewed content.

One of the best things you can do is stop using algorithmic recommendations for a few weeks. Download the Unhook plugin for YouTube, etc. Then you actually choose the internet media you are exploring.

All the cool people became addicted to eve online, got distracted and let the corps take over

With the evergrowing flow of users, normality became the expectation. The internet bar club disappeard to become real life 2.0, and in real life, you are supposed to use money, and inner jokes don’t work. We went from “you shouldn’t post personal information to the internet” to “If you don’t put your real life profile on the internet, you are a weirdo who tries to escape real life”. The new world has been claimed by the old.

Though, in an easier way than in real life, you can become a cyberhermit. Leave social media, and even though there are a lot less people out of here, if you find active forums or chatrooms, you’ll find some everlasting internet culture.

It was never really gone, just got hidden by money and large scale hypersocializers.

Pleroma is a fediverse service where there are way less people than here, but it is more “childish” (make me think of very early 2ch-4chan). You have also misskey, though they mostly speak japanese there. For anon culture, you have still IRC, and some little open chatrooms through the fediweb. Though it’s hard to find similar places to early 4ch that aren’t nazi paradises.

Good luck out there!

I feel this way too, between 2005 and 2010 could no one show me a videon from youtube that I hadn’t seen (well maybe but it never happened). it was so “bad” that my friends stoped linking videos because I had seen it already lol. Now is that impossible! Unless it is a person who watch the same youtubers as I do which is mainly makers and creative ppl. This is also why YouTube rewind would never work for me anymore.

I felt that most ppl on the internet was like minded ppl and we had a culture going on, now does it matter more what platform you are on and it feels more like part of your real life. I haven’t seen ppl use IRL at all for example and I assume it is because the difference is not as clear anymore, the two world’s have mixed together. I remember we talked about our real lifes as if that was a whole different universe almost.

Facebook/social media went mobile in 2012 and ever since then the internet is full of normies instead of just us nerds.

I always hated everyone being so fake nice on the internet, a gentleman and a scholar type shit, when they’d call you a slur at the drop of a hat for the most part

you’ve got to find a community, and actively participate in order to defend it from shitheads

Join a shitposting group? Join a Chan board? Join a BBS forum?

Enshittification was inevitable its the price you pay with capitalism.