this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
283 points (94.9% liked)

Ask Lemmy

37764 readers
1310 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The internet has always been my salvation.

As a socially underdeveloped kid, I’d spend my lunch hours in the high school library on those public desktop computers, reading fandom sites about my favorite video games. Computers always made sense to me. I even owe my entire career to them.

But the internet today feels wrong. Whatever the fuck kind of psychological warfare is happening right now with this Epstein stuff is too much for my mind to handle. I can’t do it anymore.

I will love. I will vote. I will support my community and continue to oppose this fucking nightmarish system we all find ourselves in. But I need to sign off.

Imagine the door closing sound effect when logging out of AIM.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

If what was meant when OP says 'internet' is the cesspool social media, then yes, we should totally ditch them.

However, the fact remains that the real definition of internet is simply a bunch of interconnected devices that run the internet protocol (IP), nothing more and nothing less.

Though I have my doubts, I'm not disagreeing with you or anything, just pointing out that there's a lot of people confusing this term, and simple as it may be, it might be harmful.

[–] hector@lemmy.today 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think I was just trying to say that it's not doomed to enshitify if we set up new systems to work despite the malign forces at work. The idea behind open source and federation could work to set up systems that could be resistant to the enshittening.

We need a sort of federated social media as much as anything. While lemmy is a good start, we need to add more types of social medias that can interact together and improve their functioning, and also give a set of clear rules that can be appealed to a jury trial of users for serious infractions to get and keep the trust that would enable us to overcome the established silicon valley parasite companies that the government and big business has their hooks into and as such is a compromised forum we are doomed to lose the common good on.

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago

Valid point.

What I would like to add to it is that we will need to defend it from time to time.

We've already seen an example when Meta's Thread tried to federate.

Spammers have also been a nuisance, and thankfully our mods & admins have been handling them well.