It struck me recently that as the quality of content on the internet has arguably gone to shit, in the form of increasingly frequent ads plastered everywhere, paywalls or superficial/dumb blog posts or mainstream media articles, the basic idea of a link aggregator platform can naturally lose its quality, or struggle to maintain a level of quality, and so lose its appeal.

I think I can see this on lemmy (which is my favourite fediverse platform) to some extent and have probably noticed it on somewhere like hackernews to an extent too. I see a link that has an interesting/important sounding title on an interesting/important topic, then click the link and see an article or web page that maybe is just not worth my time.

I’d be curious how many people upvote a link here without reading the cited article/page?

All of which is sad and speaks to general problems with media today, with AI garbage, of course, probably about to make it worse. But regarding the fediverse and lemmy, I think it maybe raises interesting questions.

Obviously the idea of a link aggregator is to seek out and share “the good stuff”. But maybe talking about where that generally comes from needs to be a more prominent and open question? Or maybe I need to subscribe to fewer news communities? More ambitiously though, maybe, at least over time, it will get more important or valuable to lean into the forum-like or even blog-like aspect of lemmy where it’s increasingly all about the “OC” here, especially as engaging with actual humans with actual personal thoughts gets more and more valuable over time? Could private, maybe even invite-only communities even be of value here?

Thoughts?

  • maegul (he/they)OPEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I think that’s a superficial take. For instance, elsewhere in the documentation it says Lemmy can also function as a blogging platform. ... (see here). Moreover, at the beginning of the documentation it says Lemmy is a selfhosted, federated social link aggregation and **discussion forum**. (see here).

    Not that the documentation defines what is possible on the platform … its features do.

    Beyond that “link aggregator” is a generic term for reddit-like platform, and can often implicitly include all of the interactions that don’t include linking to external sources.

    • SheeEttin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Sure, but it’s inspired by reddit, where link posts are first-class features. You could always create an instance that doesn’t allow link posts. I don’t think you can create a community and disable them like you could on reddit.