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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

People whining about some Eternal September always remind me of people who moved to a city last year whining about newcomers. The internet is not usenet. You can have your own website (or mastodon server) and make it invite only. But a lot of us prefer "cities", not "villages"—or gated communities. And it seems to me that a lot of people like the city at some point and then want it to remain static and closed. When the fact that it is open is the only reason they were able to move there in the first place.

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I think the hate for the Eternal September these days it's misplaced. It's not "noobs" and average Joes that have ruined social media/the Internet, it's companies and businesses.

It's because of them the Internet has become a sanitised, soulless, for-profit space. If Mastodon succeeds, companies will open their profiles on there, and watch how Mastodon will start to wither and die.

Just wait for the first "<big multinational company> has opened their own Mastodon instance" post in the near future.

> Just wait for the first "<big multinational company> has opened their own Mastodon instance" post in the near future.

The EU have had a Mastodon instance[0] before it was cool! (Although, it isn't open to the public and only has a few EU agencies as members.)

[0]: https://social.network.europa.eu/about

My pet theory is that it's both: I can imagine that the "classical Internet" with everyone on-line could be quite awesome, and the Internet of today with only "pre-September" folks on-line could be quite awesome, too - but everyone online in the "big multinationals" Internet is not much fun.

> It's not "noobs" and average Joes that have ruined social media/the Internet, it's companies and businesses.

¿Por qué no los dos?

I agree. I think that if there only were "non-noobs" and "elite joes" on the internet, these companies wouldn't have succeeding pushing their product.

It takes two to tango.

> […] these companies wouldn't have succeeding pushing their product.

Supply- versus demand-side problems.

> Just wait for the first "<big multinational company> has opened their own Mastodon instance" post in the near future.

Yes it will become like email where you can't really run your own server unless you want to spend the rest of your time fighting to get off corporate blacklists.

A few (or even many) companies creating accounts or servers with which to promote their products or services does not strike me as an existential threat to Mastodon, the ActivityPub network, or the wider Fediverse. People don't have to follow or interact with them. Users can block accounts or domains. Server admins can block other servers.

I do see other dangers though. Here are a couple bad scenarios I don't think there are adequate safeguards to handle gracefully:

Spammers, trolls, Nazis, etc... buy domains and spin up servers in an automated manner for the sole purpose of abuse. We saw that with email and while most of us get fairly little spam now it still isn't solved. To make matters worse, it's hard for anyone with a new email server to deliver to the existing big ones.

A VC-backed startup and/or existing big tech company decides to embrace, extend, and extinguish the protocol.

The September That Never Ended was the worst thing that ever happened to The Internet.

The September That Never Ended was the best thing that ever happened to The Internet.

Yeah, it brought all those obnoxious tourists, with their Hawai'ian shirts, straw hats, loud voices, and trash.

But they also brought money. Lots of money.

That's when this whole "make lots of money in tech" thing started.

Should be an interesting story.

And that money lead to Big Tech and walled gardens.

I do miss the internet of the 1990s, but we can never go back there. What we can do, though, is fight for more open platforms.

Where most average internet users never left aol and advanced users had a webpage?

We live in an environment where most users don't leave the safety of facebook/twitter/instgram/reddit. Advanced users are running darkweb sites and doing a number of things the average person isn't.

The world hasn't changed much. Are you seeking out and supporting the unusual or are you waiting for it to come to facebook/instagram first to tell you about it?

Yeah we can, even seen the indieweb scene on neocities? Tons of web portals filled with nifty little personal websites.

Can't forget this https://spacehey.com/

Screw that money. I’d rather have the old Internet vibe back.

I do think that money has been extremely corrosive to Internet culture, but it has also been a huge motivator.

It’s kind of like, in the Nineteenth Century, large parts of the world were still unexplored, so authors like H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle, could write books like King Solomon’s Mines, or The Lost World, and people could sort of believe “it could happen.”

These days, we know our world much better. We can call up satellite views of Base Camp, on Mt. Everest.

But we are now looking much farther for “it could happen.”

I was about to post the same thing, this essentially is nimbyism and exclusivity. It's even worse as you say because unlike twitter, you can easily set up a private server and you never have to interact with the unwashed hordes again.

I'm old enough now that I've seen three or four waves of people moving into various neighborhoods, each and every one bemoaning the next wave and how terrible they were ... just like the folks they displaced (granted I say displaced indicating the typical movement of people, nothing forced).

Yep. It will be hilarious to see once Gen Z owns homes. Watch attitudes change.

It’s like when my toddler tells me I’m not playing with his toys right.

“You’re using it differently than I like to use it!”

Now imagine the toddler is part of a collective that has carefully built planes, mills, lathes, sanders and lumber-handling machinery to produce wooden toys and has been giving them away for free and sometimes accepting donations.

Oh, and they aren't a toddler, they're adults.

Oh, and they aren't your kids, either. Not related to you at all.

Now your analogy is much more useful.

> Now imagine the toddler is part of a collective that has carefully built planes, mills, lathes, sanders and lumber-handling machinery to produce wooden toys and has been giving them away for free

This just makes the toddler's position that much more stupid. As the owner of the toys, he's free to set the rules for how they can be played with. But not if he's giving them away.

There you go. That's exactly the position they are in: if you want to play with mastodon.social's toys, mastodon.social gets to set the rules. If you want to play with the toys that they have given away, over by yourself, you get to do that.

We are currently in the in-between phase where a swarm of kids have shown up to play with the neat toys, are ignoring the rules, and are about to be kicked out to go play with their own toys, unless they can learn the rules.

Those toys have been given under certain (More or less precisely/adequately defined and communicated) conditions that are constantly violated now. I still remember when ppl cared about little thing called netiquetteamd now even written terms aren't enforced :)

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