On the Internet I grew up on, pretty much anything was ok except to discuss (or even speculate about) the real-world identities of users who didn't very openly disclose them.

Now many people think the latter is ok.

because you're here bringing down the average

obvious troll is obvious

I'm not sure I do, but one thing I haven't seen mentioned here yet is consumer psychologists. I once read an argument that they could be improving people's mental health, instead they are working on manipulating people into buying more.

Social media platforms have officially taken over the role of traditional media except with none of the liability.

Someone much smarter than me once wrote that everyone thinks of their outgroup as "normies": Catholics think of non-Catholics as "normies", and "goyim" is just the Hebrew word for "normies".

There is currently no implementation of web standards that is under a more permissive license than LGPL or MPL. I think that is a gap worth filling and if I recall that is what Ladybird is doing.

In the vast majority of countries, everything written down is automatically copyrighted by default and if you want to release it into the public domain or under a free license you have to make it explicit.

That is why the explanation continues: "(other than pedantic exceptions due to calendar issues or timezone alterations, or someone dying before their birthday, or being born on a leap day, none of which apply in this case)".

Lots of problems that used to exist in this area no longer do.

Used to be that the de facto standard office format was doc/xls/ppt, now both MS Office and LibreOffice support both ODF and OOXML both of which are open standards.

Used to be that internal software was mostly written for the Windows API, now it is mostly written for web browsers (between which there are no longer any significant differences in terms of standards compatibility).

The world really is slowly getting better. I would like to help accelerate this, but don't really have any ideas where to start.

Normal once you enter adulthood. In your childhood and teen years there are lots of things that change about your life on your birthday (drinking age, age of majority, being allowed to drive a car, etc), no longer a thing in adulthood unless you want to run for president or something like that.

Like the Internet ten years ago???

You realize that ten years ago was 2013, not 2001 or something? The Internet was not quiet in 2013, in fact I found it a lot more engaging then.

I really just think the reddit/lemmy structure isn't very suited to small communities.

For small communities we should have a platform structured like a traditional web forum with flat threads and thread bumping. This causes people to get endless streams of discussion even with relatively few users.