The inheritance is not just a simple chain. New things developed, were based on old and proven stuff, sometimes mixed with ideas taken from somewhere else… Every now and then something completely new gets invented… It’s more tangled.

But I like Lemmy. It’s open, accessible, owned by the people and unites people, the way it works. In that regard it feels like a sucessor of what was before the forums in the 2000s.

Forums also have been used to fragment communities. Sometimes you had to sign up everywhere to join in or even read. And there wasn’t one ‘the’ place.

Discord is especially bad. Everything happens behind closed doors. You miss out on everything that doesn’t accidentally happen where you’re already subscribed to. And everybody has their small little kingdom and you have to submit to them. It doesn’t unite people and it isn’t democratic at all. I don’t like it.

Reddit is kinda ‘meh’. It is/was ‘the place’ to discuss things. But it’s owned by a single large entity whose intentions aren’t well aligned with mine. I don’t consider them harmful like the design decisions for Discord, but I don’t participate anymore, either.

I think the fediverse has some technical issues with scaling. But that can be overcome. Other than that, it’s superior to most things out there today.