The fediverse is similar enough for me :)
People Twitter
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a pic of the tweet or similar. No direct links to the tweet.
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
- Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major figure or a politician.
I'm so old I remember webrings.
We need to just ban advertising. The free with ads model is toxic to humanity.
It ain't years it's months ago...
Ah yes, the halceon days of non-stop pop-up ads and malware taskbars. /s
Not to mention that everything they mentioned was absolutely started to become what it is today. Nothing changed, they just progressed their plans over 20 years. Pretending it was all started with benevolent intentions is naive at best.
The corporations could not get their heads wrapped around the internet at first. They needed to deal with nerds and computer geeks to get anything done. These same people that they had kicked around and laughed at for being useless now had to be brought into boardrooms for product discussions. Then the dot com crashes happened and corporations learned that all of those people were not Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. All of these gave the internet an extended era that felt a bit like the "Wild West". AOL internet was a commercial product that got mauled constantly because it hired average skilled programmers, the really ingenious programmers were the ones developing Instant Message based "punters" and program crashing email "bombs".
I was there, even a couple years before that... and in reality not so much has changed.
What we now call "The Internet" is what BTX (in germany) was back then: A commercialised platform controlled by corporations. Trolling, hate, ragebait... all nothing new, just look at archived posts from the Usenet!
The cool thing is that we now can rebuild something that is more akin to the BBS networks of yesteryear, something like the Fido-net, something that is entirely owned by the people using it.
I'm not worried. We'll make a new one.
Yee Gads, Del needs to get off twittler. Come to Fedi, Fren!
I think those old forums dedicated to discussions and interests are still there. The internet has been urbanized and now most people live in large cities, but some people still live in small towns in the countryside.