schnurrito
Facebook is still called that. The social media platform, that is; the company that runs it is now called Meta, and it makes sense to distinguish those.
Most of what they were talking about had something to do with the Trump presidency. That is long over by now, it has now become clear to everyone that Biden isn't going to be replaced by Trump except through an election.
SQL is supposed to look like this: SELECT status, name FROM some_table LIMIT 5
And by now we have so many worse threats to free communication on the Internet than the copyright industry, yet the Internet is nowhere near as united against any of them as in 2012. On the contrary, everyone now calls for censorship of the other side's "misinformation", "hate speech", content "harmful to minors", etc etc.
You know, when I first started to become active on Internet communities as a preteen in the early-to-mid-2000s, I don't think anyone really used the term "social media" to describe them. The term may have existed already, but I didn't think of myself as a user of "social media" at all at the time.
At the time we had web forums run on software like phpBB. Later I discovered wikis and blogs. I have no idea when people started to insist on using the strange term "social media" which may or may not include all those things. Is Reddit/Lemmy "social media"? It certainly differs from most other "social media" in significant ways: we mostly don't use our real names, we don't have followers, we mainly communicate with random strangers rather than the people we know IRL. This is a lot more similar to traditional web forums than to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X/Mastodon, etc.
Internet before mid-2010s: The Internet is breaking down barriers of nations, enabling everyone to freely communicate with each other, even outright plan uprisings against authorities (Arab Spring)! There are hardly any limits to what we can discuss, if you have an idea, you can publish it right now and maybe change the world with it!
Internet now: Social media companies make sure, through their algorithms and moderation decisions, that the Overton window is exactly where they decide, nowhere else. They are under constant and evolving pressure to censor more of this, censor less of that, with no end in sight to not getting it "right" in someone's opinion.
I hope the fediverse succeeds in maybe restoring the old vision of the Internet.
Because that will enable people to see and interact with the things their users post without themselves being under their control.
In the 2000s we thought user-generated content would lead to a utopian future where we got our opinions from each other rather than from big companies.
Turns out: big companies, governments and other institutions with money are perfectly capable of paying people to be "users" who are "generating content". Now we get (at least some of) our opinions from them and don't even know it.
Cannot confirm. The most upvoted comment I've ever written on Lemmy was exactly about Israel/Palestine: https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/4589158
I don't know if this will change now that I've drawn attention to it.
It used to be that Wikimedia projects had lots of volunteers willing to maintain the projects, but the WMF didn't have a lot of money. Now the WMF is swimming in money (which it uses to do more and more "office actions" bypassing community processes), but editor numbers are staying constant or even shrinking. People nowadays like to spend time a lot more pretty much everywhere else on the Internet than on Wikimedia projects.
It is time for free knowledge to transition to a concept where people get paid, not the wiki concept that worked fine to start out in the beginning, but whose limits have now become clear.
I have released thousands of photos I took under free licenses.