< missing when the internet was more benefit than burden
All I can do is nod.
As Github's trending page declined from interesting hobby projects to (what I now perceive to be) big tech status reports, and Gitlab proved to not be the freer alternative that people wanted (take a look at their sponsors), I began to despair.
The final nail on the coffin for me was the loss of the search function on pastebin last year, which used to be a treasure trove of juicy information.
When did it all go so wrong?
I look back to the silver age of the internet as if it were only a fever dream, promising a better tomorrow as it empowered anybody with a keen interest in learning something new.
Sure, I could put on my elitist hat and say the internet empowered people who shouldn't have been empowered, let alone let anywhere near a keyboard, but the internet was never a friendly place to begin with and trolls always a had a room they could troll.
I guess that's the thing I miss the most: room, space to breathe, to ask an honest question and to get a detailed reply in return or get told to go to hell, instead of now trying to attract an answer by asking a more popular question instead of the one I actually wanted to ask.
There's fear there. Fear to say the wrong thing to anger a hive mind that used to be flat hierarchy of reasonably like-minded individuals, and is now... well no one knows whats driving popular opinion on these sites any more, but it certainly isn't the users anymore.
I'm waiting for a real community-based internet to rise up again. Something I can connect to my neighbours with, and they can connect easily back. Something involving resource sharing to build trust. A community garden of sorts if you will.
Bartender I appear to have wandered outside into your garden during my tirade, and I must say - your roses smell fanstatic.
Yeah I fully agree, even though this is obviously a common sentiment on the geminispace, and communities intimately linked to it (like this one), along with much of the Fediverse that the modern internet is practically no longer *free*, as the main institutions that hold it up in theory are funded by those same corporations that for support its biggest problems. I would personally enjoy seeing new communities pop up.
Beckons bartender nicely
In a way it's not unlike what happens to teachers/masters in philoso-religio realms: a master and their early, tight-knit followers (who actually get the teaching...) eventually discovered by lesser beings whose, um, lessness morphs any salvation and/or miracles into variations on the hyper-egotic theme of "hooray for my side", soon enough with what's left having nothing in common with the original teaching(s).
In this species, life's essentially an endless sequence of Eternal Septembers....