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   myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Thursday, 02-Jul-2026 03:06:27 JST myrmepropagandist

   "People sometimes end up on obscure sites run by just... anyone. A page made by a local club is as easy to find as a corporate site."

   I didn't realize that the guy I was talking with about the internet in 1999 thought of this as a *problem* to be solved... not what made the internet awesome.

   All along there have been people who see everything you love about the internet as an unfortunate design oversight, something to be fixed. And they've been working for decades to make it happen.

   • Soatok Dreamseeker, Christine Lemmer-Webber and Rich Felker repeated this.
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     myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Thursday, 02-Jul-2026 03:07:05 JST myrmepropagandist

     in reply to

     All this time... they hate it. They hated how creative it was, they hated the serendipity, the intense meritocracy of memes and social vitality. All of the magical chaos that had me so delighted and charmed ...

     I don't know why I didn't see this sooner.

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     llewelly (llewelly@sauropods.win)'s status on Thursday, 02-Jul-2026 12:41:02 JST llewelly

     in reply to

     @futurebird all through the 1990s, and to a lesser extent during the early 2000s, most of the publishing industry, especially magazines and newspapers, was thoroughly hostile to the world wide web, and the fact that the world wide web enabled individuals and small underfunded groups to reach audiences without the enablement of traditional publishers greatly upset them. The WWW besmirched their beautiful oligopoly.