Lately I’ve found myself thinking about BBSes for the first time in ages.
Online used to feel like an actual place.
Twitter used to be a fantastic place to interact with other electronics hobbyist. Then it became the nazi bar and that was that. Every once in a while I go back out of morbid curiosity but the Following tab is barren and the For You tab is disgusting.
I found a place on Mastodon, but the critical mass just isn’t there.
It doesn’t help that many cool looking hobby projects are now just AI slop.
Things are bleak.
This is why I’m building all my own stuff.
This sort of post is ridiculous ... the vast majority of people are not "packing up", and people are constantly arriving.
This is an interesting idea but was too homogenized by the article. WordPress shouldn’t be lumped in with the rest. GitHub too.
It would have been better to categorize the reasons/platforms and then analyze if the farewell posts matched the crimes of the platforms.
The enshittification continues until there's nothing left.
I stopped using Reddit after Apollo got blocked, well, I had it side-loaded for a while too with AltStore, but that stopped working
Reddit went to absolute shit
Enshittification takes so much from us
> A few years ago that would have sounded like giving up
I’m confused by that sentence. Giving up on what exactly?
Leaving a large audience platform was/is like giving up on having a large audience for your stuff.
Personal sites were always an option and yet they chose the big platform. I interpret "giving up" in that sense, giving up your preference.
This reads as slop to me. Added contrast containing no semantic content.
Same with:
> it changed under them
This post has a badge that says “written by a human not by AI”… but I noticed a lot of LLMisms, and Pangram says it’s 100% AI generated. The post also cites AI as a reason for everyone leaving everything…some kind of weird irony here :/
Pangram is utterly useless.
[citation-needed]
People don't loudly announce they're not going anywhere and not changing anything, of course you only perceive the ones who do otherwise.
It doesn't mean they there's a wide spread trend.
[delayed]
Everyone says they are packing up. But most of the people I’ve seen complain either are still on the site they complain about, or left briefly just to realize that other sites aren’t any better and came back.
I’ve left everything (Facebook, Instagram, I’ve even deleted the YouTube app from my phone, etc.) apart from HN. I occasionally look at Twitter, but only when someone sends me a link.
So there are some counterexamples.
Me too, except for YouTube. I'm still hopelessly addicted to YouTube, but I'm working on it. I also ditched my smartphone eight months ago and going strong, zero desire to return to it.
Seriously, fuck all this shit. Some people love to say that love of the old web is just nostalgia and they are free to think what they want.
Non sequitur. "Everyone is" is nonsense, "most aren't" is correct. Individuals who are: irrelevant, as that was already implied.
Getting really tired of proving I'm human every time I visit a website. It's about 90% of the time now.
[delayed]
Soon you'll have to prove you're an adult the same way to click through for cookies. Can't wait.
Don't forget having to take a picture of yourself to pass a Recaptcha check. Ideally, that'll be acknowledged as a bad idea and just go away, but we'll see.
I spent a lot of my time on the internet because I was lonely in my teens and these connections were exciting. I learned software dev because I was a nerd that loved math and loved the concept of building software, having complete control on how it's done. That was the concept I signed up for.
Software dev today is sitting in front of a prompt bar, sometimes checking the IDE, sometimes some DevOps, but nothing about it excites me anymore. Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days. Choosing not to use LLMs has little to no reward imo.
I'm slowly moving away from software dev because the rose tinted glasses I saw the job as are shattering
> Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days. Choosing not to use LLMs has little to no reward imo. I'm slowly moving away from software dev because the rose tinted glasses I saw the job as are shattering
Try solving a very hard problem or a very good game. Or at least publish some very good polished software, they all sucks! This really is a paradox, all this doomerism and AI that has solved “coding” and it’s “very good now” and we don’t mot only have not good software, but it’s getting worse! Good lord how the heck we get out of this situation?
> Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days.
This is only true if your definition of "hobby project" is limited to "initial prototype with basic functionality and a generic corporate-looking landing page".
Yeah, a lot of tools that would have made fun weekend projects can now be one-shot by Claude and aren't even worth sharing, because someone who needs that functionality can just use Claude too. But you can accomplish so much more now. Someone just did a hobby project to reverse engineer NVidia drivers and make them work on Windows XP. Dream bigger!
Which is interesting, because I've always been a musician first and software dev as a side interest, and I feel like LLMs have made the software iteration loop fast enough that it feels as exciting as making music for me.
I wonder if there's some blend of software and other interest that might rekindle that novelty for you?
Probably not. They made "smart nerd" their whole personality and that is now being challenged, hurts the ego.
I part of the reason is Capthas, something is needed but Capthas are a pain to use.
No, I don't think captchas are a reason people are leaving platforms, at least not in any large number. If the content of a platform is good, the (extremely slight) roadbump for people is not going to deter them.
Keep in mind that for the average person (and even the average techy), they will not even see the captcha, because they have enough tracking them across the web that it will 'autoresolve' them as a human. I only see captcha's nowadays when I am working on web scraping automation or browsing from my VPS.
Yes, I think captchas are the wrong solution. They annoy all clients, humans included.
IP+subnet based throttling on the other hand is a perfectly working solution, optionally with a proof-of-work or login requirement for intensive POST requests only. Why is it a problem if only a few requests per day are made per home IP? Just how bad and inefficient is the web server?
Bots are not a second class client. They were here before AI, and they, like AI, work for humans. For the most part, they're not trolling the web autonomously.
[dead]
IP blocking doesn't work for bots, they use residential IP addresses and make only one or two requests per IP.
[1] Proposed Amendment to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (2026-05-08) - https://www.karlbunch.com/random/website-protection-act/
Sorry but your proposal is egregious, considering your website's access far falls short of a DDoS attack against it. You voluntarily host it on the public web.
Even a $5 VM I have has an included quota of at least 1TB egress data per month, and it can handle 9,540,534 requests in a day if not less. In practice, my egress quota is larger by virtue of having a couple of more nodes.
If you actually cared, you would use something cheaper then AWS, ideally with zstandard compression, and a CPU efficient service that doesn't buckle under a moderate load.
Is this a real trend or like that time everyone abandoned Twitter for Mastodon?
I know a considerable number of people who abandoned Twitter for either Mastodon or Bluesky and haven't gone back. It probably depends on what circles you run in. There are some people I know who keep Twitter accounts because it's used for professional networking, for example, but they're in specific fields.
People (correctly) bag on Bluesky's mod team (it'd be awesome if they just stopped doing boneheaded shit but that's a complaint as old as USENET...) but I have thriving communities there. I post, I respond to posts. I don't get 17k likes but I don't especially want that anymore. I like small social media and Bluesky delivers.
Mastodon is absolutely thriving. I get you want to be a contrarian but the fediverse is loaded with people who left X and never went back.
Can confirm, I'm one of those people. I mean I had an account on a Mastodon instance before that, but it became my primary social platform when Twitter got taken over.
non sequitur. The point is that "everyone" left Twitter is nonsense; no one said that no one did. Mastodon and Bluesky are alternatives, but Twitter is still dominant despite all the Nazis there.
This doesn't look like a particularly thriving platform: https://mastodon-analytics.com/#:~:text=Mastodon%20Active%20...
I hope one day someone calls one of my projects a failure because I only have a few hundred thousand daily users.
just don't compete against facebook and twitter.
mastodon has failed to capture the audience numbers of the products it sought to compete against, you can say that without criticizing the product.
They never wanted to capture every single user (have you seen the people on twitter? who would want to deal with that???)
They sought to carve out a targeted subset of users and did so successfully.
Life is about more than numbers, you know. Would you call your local steakhouse a failure because they're not putting up the numbers McDonalds does?
> mastodon has failed to capture the audience numbers of the products it sought to compete against
I really don't think that was ever the goal.