Nobody said they are. However, “a great fediverse alternative to Facebook” does not mean, in the minds of most people who might read it: “you could host a website that would serve as a great fediverse alternative to Facebook.”

Huh. Well, everybody I hung out with knew about it. IIRC moderation was tacked on after USENET had already taken off. If a newsgroup wasn’t proposed with moderation then it couldn’t be moderated, so most of them weren’t. It’s pretty wild that they didn’t understand how desperately necessary it would be. In order to get a group to be moderated you’d have to get a proposal for an entirely new group through the committee, which was nearly impossible. The process was so slow and bureaucratic that the web literally just showed up and stole it all in what seemed like overnight. I remember when I switched over… it was like 2002, 2003? I’ve never had as much fun on any web forum as I had on USENET though. Those were fun times. And don’t get me started on the web’s lack of threaded discussions. Drove me NUTS.

Yes pardon me I left off the word “largely” before “unmoderated.” We all knew it was possible, but it didn’t matter because, as you point out - nobody really did.

Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.

It genuinely doesn’t matter. I’d prefer it if it would stay at this level. Reddit sucks now. This is like Reddit was 13 years ago.

I wrote a script that makes Lemmy links on old.lemmy behave this way (like you like them on reddit).

You can use it as a bookmarklet or if you use grease/tampermonkey you can apply it to the site automagically.

This is so true. I wish there was a will/way to eliminate bots altogether on a platform. The more popular a platform is, the more bots swarm in to sway the opinions of the crowd - political opinions, consumer opinions, you name it. Reddit was lousy with bots. Constant ceaseless opinion farming. What’s to stop Lemmy from becoming just as obnoxious?

What I can’t figure is… who sits down and thinks “fuck Elon Musk and Twitter, I’m sick of this bullshit” and then follows that logic with “you know what I need more of in my life? Fuckin’ FACEBOOK, yeah.”

I don’t think this will matter at all. The first instance that brands itself as “we only federate with instances that exclude all relationships with Meta,” is the instance I will be in and all the people who I want to hang around will be there also. Federating with Meta will be like holding a flashing neon sign that says “stay away from me.”

I don’t want anything to do with Reddit anymore and I haven’t had anything to do with Twitter or Facebook for more than 10 years - and all for similar reasons. Huge groups of people brought together by money are fucking poison.