It's not the people that got dumber, the tech did. Everyone has the capacity to become more knowledgeable of computers and the internet as a whole, but large corporations dumbed it down so they can take control of everything.
The best you can do for now is to inform people. Bring it up into conversation with your friends and family. Explain it in a way thats easy to understand and show the positives of Lemmy and other fediverse platforms. Also contribute as much as you can to the fediverse because it is nothing without active communities.
I think this is going to be a trend. Centralized social media just isn't financially viable and it's worse for the users in so many ways. We already have alternatives for youtube, reddit, and twitter popping up. I think youtube might be the hardest to replace though because so many people view youtube as a job rather than a place to share content just for the sake of it. Hopefully with all this we can return to the good old days of the internet where a few corporations didn't control the majority of traffic.
My bigger worry is that they'll try and take control of the fediverse on a larger scale. Even if all of their users join the fediverse and it becomes less convenient to be defederated from the larger corporate instances you can still have accounts on smaller instances or your own and you'll be able to completely block all the corporate instances. But what if they strike a deal with activitypub? From my knowledge they're the backend of the entire fediverse. If they're able to do what they want with the fediverse as a whole then where do we go? I think that the developers of activitypub would be against that but meta can spend as much as they want to take control of this and I don't know the developers personally so I can't be sure if they'd pass on that money. I might be worrying a bit too much but big tech has a long history of taking stuff over like this.; social media and e-mail are both great examples of that.
They're supposedly in talks with activitypub, the backend of the entire fediverse. If meta can get what they want with activitypub, they'll effectively have control over the entire fediverse. I don't see that happening though because the fediverse was made in opposition of major social media sites. I see them trying to take control of the software like lemmy and kbin or if that fails trying to buy popular instances or just filling the fediverse with their existing users. Luckily if the first two fail the nature of the fediverse works in our favor and the instances that want to can just defederate.
Don't be convinced that by lowering your impact you can make any change. Corporations want you to think that because if the masses think that they are the issue then they can continue what they are doing. The only way we can contribute is if we all get on the streets and protest. If millions of people get out on the streets for an indefinite amount of time, stop working, stop buying things, and demand change then we will get change.
Luckily Lemmy is open source and a lot of new developers have started contributing to it.
You should check out lemmy.dbzer0.com if you haven't already. It's pretty useful;)
Just wait till the third party apps shut down tomorrow, loads of people will be rolling in here. Then when the RIF and Sync developers release their Lemmy apps (with the same names) even more people will come. If you want there to be content right now though just keep contributing to posts you see. The more content we make right now, the more likely it is for new users to stay,
Mistake #1, using chrome. Just switch to firefox ~~or brave~~ just use firefox
You were born for whatever reason you want. If you think you're here for spiritual or religious reasons, so you can make the world a better place, or for nothing, that's all ok. I personally believe I'm here for religious reasons but if you don't agree with that it's fine. There's no point in wasting time fighting over why we're here instead of spending what little time we have enjoying ourselves. Even if we don't have any purpose and are just going to dissapear back into the void we came from we just make it worse by sitting around doing and crying about it.
I don't care how fast AI can pump out "high quality content" because I refuse to consume any of it. I really hope the strikes are successful.