Back in the day you could find a forum post explaining exactly how anything worked, grey hat or not? Since then the internet has sanitized that out of existence. Should Lemmy revive that culture? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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Lawyers, platform moderation, and SEO have wiped it out. What's left is boring drivel whose only purpose is to sell you a product or a course or avoid a lawsuit. I realize some have moved to private groups and there are still sites if you look hard enough. But is that enough?

Federation feels like the right place to bring that culture back rather than let it die or has that ship sailed?

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[-] nieceandtows@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago

I would very much like Lemmy to be that, but unfortunately Lemmy hasn't been here long enough or 'active' enough to be that sort of a repository. I still have to search on reddit to find any specialized info or even reviews or discussions on random stuff. Funnily, if I post the same question on Lemmy and reddit, pretty much 100% of the time I get better and more numerous answers here on lemmy compared to reddit. I can see that lemmy has the people with the answers, but we need more people with the questions.

[-] daychilde@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

You can't just create such a space. It happens because people who know things hang out in places where people who ask questions also are. And such that the community encourages answering such questions.

If Lemmy continues to grow, it is possible this will happen if enough communities are formed that support in-depth discussion of issue, or become places where people seek help because people there are helpful.

[-] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

Is this something I'm too "only have seen the internet post-2010" to understand?

[-] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

Yes actually.

You nailed something that I'm actually concerned about. I heard this idea the other week and it makes sense to me.

Old heads saw the internet grow. We saw lots of different stages of development towards the corporate owned billboards that it is now. Younger people were raised by it so it's all normalized to them.

There's things older people see and go "that ain't right" that younger people don't. This begs the question, are there things older people should be preserving or bringing attention to that aint right or are am I just in my "I walked two miles uphill both ways" phase of life

[-] chunes@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The single most important thing we can do is try to instill a sense of the rich history of collaboration in computing. That the internet is really about DIY and not passive consumption. We are users, not consumers, who should be free to inspect and modify the software we use.

"If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users." ~ Richard Stallman

[-] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago

I still remember all the talk about the end of data scarcity in the early days. Lots of concern that we now have a new frontier that can replicate information endlessly but that they'll try to lock it away behind paywalls and limit who can have what.

[-] Mothra@mander.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

Be the change you wish to see. Personally I'm not holding back information, sadly there is only so much I know about.

[-] CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 week ago

I think this would be tough to implement on lemmy because there's no easy way (at least not that i know of) to search Lemmy as a whole. Results don't show up in a google search and even if they did, you can't just attach "lemmy.com" to your query since there are so many independent instances that could be hosting this content.

[-] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I was just thinking of communities that could act as discussions or KB posts.

I understand that some sites don't want meta lawyers coming at them. They're monolithic and have other infrastructure concerns that can be targeted. But lemmy solves some of those issues. Federation seems like it can revive some things that corporate owned internet has been trying to wipe clean.

Maybe the end goal of lemmy is to end up like reddit. A place to advertise and hawk products and entertainment. I really don't know enough about it. But from what I see, I'm just wondering if it's worth discussing.

[-] cattywampas@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

Is there something in particular you're looking for that you can't find? I feel like I can find out how most anything works on the internet.

[-] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago

I've been interested in methods to scrape social media. The more measures they create to block scraping the more I want to scrape it.

I'm interested in getting datasets to play around and analyze. Personal project stuff and just to learn and upgrade myself while doing something I'm interested in.

[-] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

Check out the kiwix library, it's not social media but you can download all sorts of wiki-style sites as .zim files. Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, DevDocs just to name a few. If you have an app that can read .zim files, it'll open them just like a wiki site.

It's probably a lot easier than scraping social media. But if you really want to do that, there's probably a python package for it.

If you have specific DIY projects, you'll probably find instructions on ifixit, instructables, or wikihow. Or find some really niche hobby websites and browse their forums and tutorials.

[-] in_my_honest_opinion@piefed.social -1 points 1 week ago

https://cyberpress.org/10pb-data-breach-at-tianjin-supercomputer/

I would hop on tor browser and start hunting around on Torch or haytstack for subsets of that data.

[-] TachyonTele@piefed.social 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

What do you mean? What can't you find?

Actually, a How-to comm might be a great idea

[-] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago

What kicked this off was a desire to scrape Facebook groups to build a dataset. I just wanted to play around with different things to see patterns or sentiment analyses.

Seems like there was this shift or bifurcation online about a decade or so ago. Information was everywhere. Now it isn't.

[-] kreskin@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago

The whole tech security industry is kind of pathetic. Full of posers who strut around with few skills and are unable to think along the lines of making tradeoffs for business results.

[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

The whole tech security industry is kind of pathetic.

Open with disdain. Bold move, cotton.

Full of posers who strut around with few skills

Not untrue, but still a bit harsh.

and are unable to think along the lines of making tradeoffs for business results.

Sacrificing security "for business results" ? That doesn't sound like security. It sounds like anti-securirt.

How long have you been a project manager? Do you like it ?

this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2026

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