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What happened to internet culture?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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Asklemmy
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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.
My issue is those “smaller communities” for my niches withered away, lost in the depths of SEO and attention machines.
I’m not innocent there. I stopped participating in many in lieu of Discord and Reddit which, in hindsight, I feel sick about. But the draw of phone pings and algorithms and critical mass is very powerful.
Exactly this. I've been running forums since I was a teen in the mid-00s and I've still got one. It's much smaller than it used to be, but some of us have known each other for twenty years. It's harder to find us, but occasionally someone still wanders in.