The internet is worse than it used to be. How did we get here, and can we go back?
The internet is worse than it used to be. How did we get here, and can we go back?
Libraries should evolve to play a larger role in the internet, theyve been trying to reinvent themselves and i think this best aligns with their spiritual purpose. Some ideas:
Caretakers of digital archives.
Caretakers of relevant open source projects.
Could I get a free domain with my library card?
Could I get free api access to mapping or other localized data?
Should libraries host local fediverse instances for civic users? (think police, firefighter alert, other community related feeds)
I'm very much onboard with this. Idk if I'd say it's the libraries job though, I think it should be at the city level for community instances.
The library is appealing to me because:
Precedence: pre internet I could connect to the library over a landlines and access the library and community news.
Expertise: not necessarily deep tech expertise, but with information retrieval, curation, education.
Community access: libraries are a municipal service with brick and mortar locations, and are heavily involved with community/public engagement.
For clarity, on the fediverse instance aspect. I was thinking more read only, with users being more official organizations with a barrier of entry vs. The general public. I personally wouldn't want libraries to be moderating public discourse - this should be arms reach. And wouldn't want them worrying about liability.
Public information (like safety bulletins for example) shouldn't exclusively be sitting on a for profit ad platform, it's bizarre.
How did we get here? Adtech, tracking, monetization.
Can we go back? By removing the ubiquitous affiliate marketing financial incentives, so no.
Yeah man. Last time YouTube was good was when people were making videos just for fun, not for clout.
Don't be silly, the proletariat just needs to unite, seize the nuclear stockpiles of at least two nations capable of destroying all life on earth in defense of the oligarchy's hoards, and then decentralize ownership of the global communication infrastructure.
Easy.
Go back to site directories.
Curate your news feed.
Stop using a single corporate search engine.
Participate in online social communities, not in social media.
Love that last line. Will remember.
Hah, I was quite proud of that one. Thanks!
Creating a closed network on the Internet where any commercialization and domination are prohibited might help?
Something like Tor/freenet/I2P, but less shady (I know it’s not meant to be like this), open and accessible to anyone.
Edit: I remembered about gemini protocol, where you get
lightweight online space where documents are just documents, in the interests of every reader's privacy, attention and bandwidth
Perfect for the new better internet, huh?
For Android/iOS users, there’s a client called Lagrange on F-droid and Testflight
TIL - there is something called Gopher and Gemini. Looks interesting, will read more on it.
Neither is all that great in practice.
Gopher has many problems as a protocol. The original versions of HTTP had much the same problems, such as closing the connection at the end of a transfer rather than having a length header or a signal that the connection is actually done. HTTP went on to fix most of those problems, but Gopher never got the chance. Gopher+ started fixing it up, but it was a victim of bad timing. The Mosaic browser was released shortly after Gopher+ and everyone started switching over. To my knowledge, nobody has ever implemented Gopher+ on either a client or server. Not even after over 20 years of a "revival" movement.
Gemini intentionally limits things, such as not having inline images. This is supposed to be done to keep out methods that have been historically used to track users, but things don't work that way. I can just as easily send my logs to a data broker without using a pixel tracker if that's what I want to do.
In the end, you can just use HTTP with a static web page, zero cookies, and no JavaScript. That's what I ended up doing for my old blog (after offering a Gemini version for a while), including converting a bunch of YouTube <iframe> tags to linked screenshots so you don't even get YouTube cookies.
Fyi, there’s a portal site: gemini://medusae.space/
(http version if you’re not on gemini yet)
Back in the days of the wild frontier things were chaotic, anarchic, violent, and unconstrained.
Then came the churches, then came the schools
Then came the lawyers, then came the rules
Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads
And the dirty old track was the Telegraph Road
And now we're all fenced in, regulated, allowed to wander only in approved lanes... oh, wait, sorry, we're talking about the internet, not real life!
This pretty much. It got 'civilized'
'monetized'
Nah, people got changed too. The younger generation is not interested in the technology that much otherwise then usage of it. Also even the older generation lost its interests because of getting older and family
I really hate to argue in favor of all those scary things, but with those things in the old west came education and improvements to quality of life; better protections for the vulnerable and cures and prevention of disease.
Same could be said of the internet if we follow the analogy.
improvements to quality of life;
Native Americans: "Beg your pardon?"
Kind of my point. We gained ecommerce, streaming services, platforms such as this one, online gaming, mapping services, and others - at the cost of the freedoms for which people are nostalgic. And now we have ads, personalization, tracking, and inevitable enshitification.
Not sure this has been said yet, but Neocities is a pretty great throwback to GeoCities and the early 2000's web.
All a bunch of small, handcrafted websites and personal blogs by individuals and small groups.
Exploring feels like I remember back in the early 2000's as a teen. Crazy and weird sites, hidden links and easter eggs, ARGs, random annon comments you can post to a wall, .gifs all over, pixel art, hacker manifestos, links to other similar sites, etc.
The Fediverse is pretty great too.
I wish there were more site directories curated by communities, that would reduce my reliance on search engines for sure. RSS is great, I've been using that to help build my personal content feed.
neocities
this is very nice thank you
Absolutely!
Oh my gosh, there's webrings! That used to be such a good way to find new websites in a given topic.
Yes!
The Fediverse is as close as I've gotten to Internet the way it used to be, and I donate to the instances I use in order to keep it that way. I wish everyone would.
Someone showed me this and it's the closest I've seen to the way the internet used to be lol
Shows a different site every click
Wiby is great. I think of it as more of a museum, an incomplete collection of antiques. The fediverse is thriving, it has a pulse.
Capitalism. No.
I totally agree. Corporate interests and rampant consumerism have ruined the majority of the internet.
Glad we still have refuges like lemmy though to take solace in. Proportionally we're a smaller part, but absolutely I'd say we're about the same or larger than in the 2000s.
New rule: programmatic advertising is illegal
This. Lemmy is the way to go. Decentralized Communities connected via API.
I don't see many other possibilities. The system needs a "free for ever" mechanic or big money shits into everything.
Lemmy is the way to go. Decentralized Communities connected via API.
This only works to a degree. Eventually, the communities that allow people to register most easily and see the most active content become the overwhelming majority of the content on the system. And if these communities don't do a good job of self-policing, they just become mini-2008-style Reddits, filling up with the same bot accounts and serial assholes and sex pests that degraded the original.
Bigger sites start swamping smaller sites with traffic and overwhelming the capacity of smaller communities, so you get waves of defederation and new Walled Gardens of content.
The issue isn't the technology, its the participants in that technology. Too many malicious actors piling onto a platform and either corrupting the administration or degrading the quality of content will inevitably lead to enshitification.
Federation only mitigates this by allowing smaller instances to break away and abandon larger ones. It does nothing to screen the sincere and human actors from the malicious and automatic accounts.
I think monetization ruined it. There's a lot more trash to sift through.
How did we get here
Money!
can we go back?
No!
To a large degree, the same internet that used to be, still is.
Keep in mind that in the era they are nostalgic for, the internet involved roughly 4% of the world's population. As big in the public conciousness was, it was a relatively small thing.
For example, most people see Lemmy as pretty small and much slower content coming at you than reddit. However Lemmy is still way bigger than what a mid 90s experience with the internet would be. I can still connect to play BBS Door games and there's barely anyone there, but there were barely any people there back then either. The "old" internet is still there, it's just small compared to the vast majority of the internet that came about later.
Some things are gone, but replaced. For example Geocities now has neocities, which is niche by today's standards, but wouldn't be shocked if neocities technically is bigger than geocities ever was in absolute terms.
Some things are gone and won't come back. The late 2000s saw a really nice and stable all-you-can-watch streaming experience from Netflix, and their success brought about maddening licensing deals where material randomly appears, moves, and disappears and where a lot of material demands more to "rent" than buying an actual Blu Ray disc of it would cost (have gone back to buying discs as of late because it's cheaper than streaming).
True. Heck, even ol' Slashdot is still kicking around and I think it was the first website discussion board I'd encountered (or maybe that was Fark? which is also kicking around still!)
Yeah, and the ol' "slashdot effect" is hardly a concern anymore because things have gotten so much more capable as slashdot didn't grow.
I'm sitting at a laptop with 8-way 2.3 ghz, 32GB of RAM, a way faster NVME storage than any datacenter array would deliver in that era with a gigabit internet connection from my house. Way outclassing any hosting demands from the 90s for the most severe "slashdotting" that slashdot ever could inflict back then.
To deal with 'modern internet scale', you have to resort to more resources, but to keep up with the 'like 90s subset', little old rasberry pis can even keep pace.
I've actually been visiting Fark a few times a week ever since the Reddit boycott last year! I didn't realize how much I had missed it.
Well, actually:
When Online Content Disappears
"38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later"
I would say internet "in kind", not necesarily verbatim the content from back then. I think if someone inventoried the subset of the internet that was "like the good old days" more or less that it would probably match in scale 1997 internet or so, or be larger. Styles may change and content, but the general spirit and approaches persist, just as a now minority in a much bigger sea of crap that came to join it.
However Lemmy is still way bigger than what a mid 90s experience with the internet would be.
IRC was a ghost town the last time I checked in on it. In the mid-90s there were constantly thousands of people on it.
A bit more of a direct comparison would be IRC to, say, Matrix. Last year I see an article announcing Matrix user count and it was more than all the internet users combined in 1997. This is a near-nothing number in modern internet scale, not even 4% of Facebook userbase, but I'd say that Matrix is about as close as I can conceive of "IRC-like" mindset applied with more modern principles in play. Yes you have billions in more popular social networking and communication networks, but there remains many millions of people's worth of "internet" that resembles the 90s in some structural ways, which is how many people we had on the internet total in the 90s.
One huge difference is of course that no longer does a wider populace see those folks as potential pathfinders for others to join, but their own little weird niche not playing the same way as everyone else, with no advantage that they can understand in play.
Since when internet usage became wide spread enough that it could be used to make billions and/or promote political propaganda (which really ties back to again making money in most cases).
Anything that becomes used by a reasonable fraction of the whole world will be in the target of governments, venture capitalists (i.e individuals seeking for en masse manipulation). There is no way to prevent this as long as both exist.
Creating a lot of small communities rather than one large community is a good incentive but I think it fails to completely address this issue as long as they are interconnected in some way.
Free hosting, for everyone, without ads.
Ut-oh.
(But seriously, while it wasn't free, having an account with an ISP used to come with 10 MB of personal webspace without ads or anything. That's something you never really see these days.)
Yeah you can host your own blog on the fediverse. I've started similar attempts, in fact, such as !aniki_blog@feddit.org . I intend to expand it, but it takes time getting used to this type of personal web space.
Alternately, what'd be really neat would be an easy way to mostly completely do a webpage setup for someone using the free hosting options that do exist.
Like, a tool that makes handling deploying something to Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages or whomever else offers basically free web hosting that isn't nerdy to the point that you need a 6,000 word document to explain the steps you'd have to take to get a webpage from a HTML editor to being actually hosted.
Or, IDK, maybe going back for ye old domain.com/~username/ web hosting could be an interesting project to take on, since I'm sure handling file uploads like that should be trivial (lots and loooots of ways to do that.). Just have to not end up going Straight To Jail offering hosting for people, I suppose.
Quality through obfuscation... make it harder to use. If the dimwits can't figure out how to use it...
Usenet was the best.
Still is 😉
needs enshitfication vaccination, if we can make it
Corporations and commercial interests taking over the internet is inevitable. the only free corners left are the darknets with tor/i2p. but because the normies can't bother use that isn't falshy and trendy, there might not be any other chance to replace this decrepit boring dystopia.
Betteridge's law of headlines. Any headline that ends with a question the answer is always no.
I'm still glad for online ordering, wikipedia, small digital communities, youtube, email, and lots of stuff.
The rest of it is inevitable. And it requires being able to put down the phone and step away from the keyboard.
That is what we need to be able to do.
Move away from the shiny rectangle for a bit for eye contact socializing, too.
Saying the internet was better is a haze of nostalgia, a gross underappreciation of new technologies, and a smattering of truth.
Over 38% of the stuff I flush down the toilet is gone forever, too, and that's ok.
The early Internet was interesting only because it was new and different. Most of the stuff out there was low-quality stuff just for funsies projects. The barrier to entry is still very low. Anyone who wants to put up a website with whatever they're interested in requires no technical expertise and isn't even expensive. But you don't see a lot of that because it's not new or exciting and few people are going to waste their time on it. On the upside, you can now throw up your own federated content system with relatively little work and have a huge community for very very little. Things are gone chiefly because they weren't worth saving. Sure, there are exceptions like DPReview, but they even got a reprieve because they were worth keeping.
Before the advent of filter bubbles, the internet was a creative playground where people explored different ideas, discussed varying perspectives, and collaborated with individuals from “outgroups” – those outside their social circles who may hold opposing views.
And how did anyone find those varying perspectives? Everything was unindexed, even search engines were crap. Fark, Digg and Slashdot, link aggregators and forums are the same as they've always been. Are the majority of those conversations gone? Sure, but you can find another 25,000 of them on Reddit, x, Instagram, and Lemmy, and when those are gone, some other service will replace them.
If people are moving to algo-driven social media, it's because they perceive it as advantageous to them. I found the algo ate too much of my time and moved back to diverse and static youtube clients.
I disagree with the idea that the internet is worse than it used to be. Back in the day, you went into a forum and people were MEAN for no particular reason. People do that now over politics more than anything. Before, that's just how people were.
Depends on what you mean by “back in the day”. So far as I know you could be ~30, and “back in the day” for you is the 2005 era.
For some of us “back in the day” is more like the early 90’s (and even earlier than that if we want to include other online services, like BBS’s) — and the difference since Eternal September is pretty stark (in both good and bad ways).
Yeah, now you get mean people, a drive-by malware installer, AI generated ads, and 4mb of JS that tries to scrape every detail about you so they can make a profile they can sell to (dis)information brokers.
Truly, an improvement.
(People have always sucked, the Internet just lets you interact with more people so....)
I had one forum I went to and people trolled but they were community members and if it ever got out of hand they were banned. Nowadays people seem much more vicious, the more personal and the more it stings better.
No where does that source say Biden tried to shut down the Internet. The closest is this part
Donald Trump publicly advocated that “in some places” we have to talk about “closing up the Internet.” He got his wish, but it came after him personally following his election in 2016. The very free speech about which he made fun turned out to be rather important to him and his cause.
Also I can't take a site seriously when one of their sources they link to is the Twitter user "End Wokeness"
There are some parts I agree with, but there's plenty there that's right wing dog whistles for "I want to say hateful things and have no consequences" free speech
How can we go back? We're already on the way back. It's called the Fediverse.
I help pay for my instance to operate, and it's a cost I'm happy to help shoulder.
Us instance admins appreciate it I promise
Same, its on my best pi. 🥧
How is it running you a month?
Ehhhh, the OG internet connected better because all nodes were well connected. The Fediverse is a series of single servers that can't even sync all data across themselves. It's cute, but it's post-it notes on strings atm
I wonder if there’s a more efficient way to have things sync in blocks or something. I honestly understand very little about server architecture, much less decentralized social network architecture. Maybe having a smaller number of “centralized” (community-run, redundant, independent) nodes distributing blocks of federated data to take load off the actual instance servers that would only need to upload bulk data to fewer places?
Maybe this isn’t very different from how it already operates. Fuck if I know.
Yep we have different lemmy/mastodon/etc.... instances talking with one another. Anyone can set up something like activityhub. Its a fun place in my opinion!
Btw how do we stand on just blatantly copying and reposting material from reddit? I missed the announcement talking about that.
We would be better than ever, if not for the normification.
what exactly does that mean?
Is this some kind of attack on certain minority groups or am I over thinking this comment? I googled what normification meant and the results gave me some bad vibes regarding this comments direction.
The Fediverse is a bit more like the old USENET days in some regards, but ultimately if it ever becomes more popular the same assholes that ruin other online experiences will also wind up here.
What made the Internet more exciting 30 years ago was that it was mostly comprised of the well educated and dedicated hobbyists, who had it in their best interest to generally keep things decent. We didn’t have the uber-lock-in of a handful of massive companies running everything.
It’s all Eternal September. There’s no going back at this point — any new medium that becomes popular will attract the same forces making the current Internet worse.
Exactly.
I'm interested in distributed applications (think BitTorrent, not ActivityPub), and my primary concern here is filtering. I want to be able to only see content from people I trust and people they trust (and so on), and if I do that well, I won't have to see a ton of crap. That's how regular relationships work, and I'd like to try my hand at it with anonymous relationships. Think something like Web of Trust, but adjusted for larger networks of people.
The Fediverse by design prevents this, while the internet of the old age had little if any guardrails against this specially since the platforms never really federated with another.
Did forum sites even federate? One forum sites would be dead and the next would have more activity. But what if the other forum with less activity was the one you wanted to use? The old internet was a good start but there's a reason why it's dominated by Instagram and Facebook, while email, you can use mostly any provider and not feel like you're left out.
That's kind of the glory of the fediverse, though. We can have communities using the same protocol that never interact with each other.
There can be completely separate fediverses that cater to different people.
The fediverse is just a barnacle on the larger Internet at this point. It has to become more - we need to make our own web
The Fediverse is still a new concept and it's gaining more usage then most other open source social medias. It's the best we have, and more and more people land on it. (atleast going by some Mastodon metrics.) It's not the biggest, but it's actually impressive for an an opensource project what you do have for it's userbase. I wish some people would understand that to an extent.
It's not unless you are operating your own instance.
Or at the least, avoid the major instances and use smaller instances from individuals.