I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter. So when Twitter was accidentally purchased
  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    9 hours ago

    Instead it became the only place consistently posting trustworthy information I could actually access. This became personally relevant when Trump threatened to invade Greenland, which is the kind of sentence I never expected to type and yet here we are. It would be funny if I wasn’t a tiny bit concerned that my new home was going to get a CIA overnight regime change special in the middle of the night.

    It was somewhere in the middle of DMing with someone who had forgotten more about Greenland than I would ever know and someone who lived close to an RAF base in the UK that it clicked. This was what they had been talking about. Actual human beings were able to find each other and ask direct questions without this giant mountain of bullshit engagement piled on top of it. Meta or Oracle or whoever owns TikTok this week couldn’t stop me.

    I never expected to find my news from strangers on a federated social network that half the internet has never heard of. I never expected a lot of things. But there’s something quietly beautiful about a place where people just… share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no algorithm nudging you toward rage. Just someone who spent twenty years studying Arctic policy posting a thread at 2 AM because they think you should understand what’s happening. It’s the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.

    So, a few things. One, I appreciate the authors evolution on this, but I also think for anyone who lived through the US’s campaigns in the war on terror, on resistance movements like BLM, Dakota pipeline, Occupy, Me Too, on and on…

    The American (and often global) experience is a eventual experience of realizing you are being lied to and finding a way to the truth. For me it was being enlisted and finding Democracy Now! because it was a show I could download on an mp3 players and put on mini-disks when I was preparing for underways.

    The same sentiment that the author is appreciating is one that some people in the 90’s got when they first had access to the internet. That kids in the 2000’s felt when they found alternative media (DN!, others, many coming from the WTO protests of the 90’s), that kids in the mid-2000’s felt when they found social media, when kids in the 2010’s found the second wave of social media, when kids in the 2020’s found the fediverse, and on and on.