Lawyers, platform moderation, and SEO have wiped it out. What’s left is boring drivel whose only purpose is to sell you a product or a course or avoid a lawsuit. I realize some have moved to private groups and there are still sites if you look hard enough. But is that enough?
Federation feels like the right place to bring that culture back rather than let it die or has that ship sailed?
Short answer : yes
Long answer: by the gods yes
You can’t just create such a space. It happens because people who know things hang out in places where people who ask questions also are. And such that the community encourages answering such questions.
If Lemmy continues to grow, it is possible this will happen if enough communities are formed that support in-depth discussion of issue, or become places where people seek help because people there are helpful.
I would very much like Lemmy to be that, but unfortunately Lemmy hasn’t been here long enough or ‘active’ enough to be that sort of a repository. I still have to search on reddit to find any specialized info or even reviews or discussions on random stuff. Funnily, if I post the same question on Lemmy and reddit, pretty much 100% of the time I get better and more numerous answers here on lemmy compared to reddit. I can see that lemmy has the people with the answers, but we need more people with the questions.
Is there something in particular you’re looking for that you can’t find? I feel like I can find out how most anything works on the internet.
I’ve been interested in methods to scrape social media. The more measures they create to block scraping the more I want to scrape it.
I’m interested in getting datasets to play around and analyze. Personal project stuff and just to learn and upgrade myself while doing something I’m interested in.
Check out the kiwix library, it’s not social media but you can download all sorts of wiki-style sites as .zim files. Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, DevDocs just to name a few. If you have an app that can read .zim files, it’ll open them just like a wiki site.
It’s probably a lot easier than scraping social media. But if you really want to do that, there’s probably a python package for it.
If you have specific DIY projects, you’ll probably find instructions on ifixit, instructables, or wikihow. Or find some really niche hobby websites and browse their forums and tutorials.
https://cyberpress.org/10pb-data-breach-at-tianjin-supercomputer/
I would hop on tor browser and start hunting around on Torch or haytstack for subsets of that data.
Agreed, there’s even github topics for this.
https://github.com/topics/malware
Which, github itself has been host to malware in the past… https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/glassworm-malware-hits-400-plus-code-repos-on-github-npm-vscode-openvsx/
And the recent litellm exploit too was spread thanks to github https://docs.litellm.ai/blog/security-update-march-2026
So I repeat @cattywampas@lemmy.world 's question. What is it you’re looking for? Because there’s also metasploit and tor or I2p that you can use to search as well if you’d like to dig even deeper, however I would suggest atleast a sandboxed VM and VPN for that.
Be the change you wish to see. Personally I’m not holding back information, sadly there is only so much I know about.
What do you mean? What can’t you find?
Actually, a How-to comm might be a great idea
I agree, within a minute you can either search on some search engine that censors a bit less stuff than google, like for example duckduckgo, or even asking chatgpt with some very light deception gets you any info your hearth desires
What kicked this off was a desire to scrape Facebook groups to build a dataset. I just wanted to play around with different things to see patterns or sentiment analyses.
Seems like there was this shift or bifurcation online about a decade or so ago. Information was everywhere. Now it isn’t.
The whole tech security industry is kind of pathetic. Full of posers who strut around with few skills and are unable to think along the lines of making tradeoffs for business results.
The whole tech security industry is kind of pathetic.
Open with disdain. Bold move, cotton.
Full of posers who strut around with few skills
Not untrue, but still a bit harsh.
and are unable to think along the lines of making tradeoffs for business results.
Sacrificing security “for business results” ? That doesn’t sound like security. It sounds like anti-securirt.
How long have you been a project manager? Do you like it ?
you think “project managers” are the ones who champion the balance of security vs business results? Thats not their job, at all, nor are they typically equipped with enough influence to push on that. This comment shows that you dont work within the system I am complaining about. Its Sr leaders, product people, or sometimes architects who push that balance.
http://textfiles.com/directory.html
At least a bunch of the old stuff is still out there.
I still try to find forums for this type of thing. Social networks, lemmy included, are terrible for this type of communication. Content drops from view too quickly and you can’t possibly see everything across every community where somebody posts something relevant.
I wouldn’t try to fit this particular square peg where it doesn’t fit.
Is this something I’m too “only have seen the internet post-2010” to understand?
Yes actually.
You nailed something that I’m actually concerned about. I heard this idea the other week and it makes sense to me.
Old heads saw the internet grow. We saw lots of different stages of development towards the corporate owned billboards that it is now. Younger people were raised by it so it’s all normalized to them.
There’s things older people see and go “that ain’t right” that younger people don’t. This begs the question, are there things older people should be preserving or bringing attention to that aint right or are am I just in my “I walked two miles uphill both ways” phase of life
The single most important thing we can do is try to instill a sense of the rich history of collaboration in computing. That the internet is really about DIY and not passive consumption. We are users, not consumers, who should be free to inspect and modify the software we use.
“If the users don’t control the program, the program controls the users.” ~ Richard Stallman
I still remember all the talk about the end of data scarcity in the early days. Lots of concern that we now have a new frontier that can replicate information endlessly but that they’ll try to lock it away behind paywalls and limit who can have what.
The forum posts have turned into youtube tutorials. Sometimes thats good, sometimes not so much. Depends on how well the video has been made etc. Also sometimes its a bit annoying trying to go back and forward in the video, instead of just scrolling pictures up and down.
I used to be a car mechanic and back in the day the car forums were great, because you’d go to the Opel forum to find opel stuff, ford forum for ford stuff etc. You even had specific engine forums sometims. But now those are mostly on youtube. Not sure how to feel about that.
But for example, yesterday I did a quick search for how to open a Compaq CQ61 laptop and right away found 2 website posts and 2 youtube videos about it.
The information is still around, just need to dig a bit sometimes. Or just ask. I’d be fine with Lemmy becoming a source for information… But everything dies eventually. I wouldn’t expect Lemmy to survive longer than the old forums did. If you find info that you feel was helpful, save it. Either on your harddrives or perhaps upload to internet archive etc.
Should it? Yes.
Will it? Doubtful.
I like the idea but technology has become so complex and so many layers of abstract that having a dummies guide to something will be no better then existing documentation.
How good it is depends
I think this would be tough to implement on lemmy because there’s no easy way (at least not that i know of) to search Lemmy as a whole. Results don’t show up in a google search and even if they did, you can’t just attach “lemmy.com” to your query since there are so many independent instances that could be hosting this content.
I was just thinking of communities that could act as discussions or KB posts.
I understand that some sites don’t want meta lawyers coming at them. They’re monolithic and have other infrastructure concerns that can be targeted. But lemmy solves some of those issues. Federation seems like it can revive some things that corporate owned internet has been trying to wipe clean.
Maybe the end goal of lemmy is to end up like reddit. A place to advertise and hawk products and entertainment. I really don’t know enough about it. But from what I see, I’m just wondering if it’s worth discussing.
