The internet is worse than it used to be. How did we get here, and can we go back?

I help pay for my instance to operate, and it's a cost I'm happy to help shoulder.

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

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!

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.

No. The fediverse is just more of the same mindless gargling and regurgitation of mainstream media excrement that the internet has become, but federated.

It lacks the creativity, originality, experimentation, wonder, sheer life of the old internet.

It's just as dead, enshittified, and riddled with misinformation bots as everything else.

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

It's not unless you are operating your own instance.

We would be better than ever, if not for the normification.

A few of us still remembers option 3) Regulation And also 4) Properly working anti-trust laws.

It isn’t just corporations that have ruined everything, it’s spammers and scammers and cybercriminals too. Searching any topic these days is a crapshoot, with a high likelihood of falling into a spammer’s tarpit.

To me it feels like the internet is evolving into a virtual Dark Forest. We float around in these little bubbles of sanity, hiding amid a yawning expanse of seething chaos.

I've said before and I'll say again. I would use the option on amazon for shipping that says "let your employees pee". I get my package 2-3 days later. Oh well. I don't give a shit. I'd rather normalize companies treating people like people. And if I get my limited edition pez dispenser 3 days later, so be it.

Not like it's an oxygen tank.

1 can be solved with regulation or nationalization. Services online should be public services. Like school, police, roads. You can still have private alternatives too.

History tells us there's also a release valve of a swift brick to the side of the head, one brick per billionaire.

It sounds messier than paying taxes, to me. But I'm not a billionaire, so I can't say I understand their motives.

im doing 2 actually.

It's fascinating how the absolute majority of people is trying to solve both social and technical problems at the same time via only social or only technical means. Again and again.

You need both.

Fediverse works right for moderation, but technically communities and users are part of an instance, and an instance is a physical thing that may go down. Just like most of our Web has vanished. And also, of course, it uses Web technologies.

Further my idea as to what should be done about this (one approach is Nostr, unloved here because of people who use it ; I also think it's too primitive):

The storage must be full p2p. Like Freenet, but probably optimized so that people would only store what they themselves need, and give some space to others in the communities they participate in. Not to all the network, like Freenet, but only to whom they want.

The identities should be "federated", as in communities allowing moderation. Moderation should be done via signed "delete" records, and users would then not replicate "deleted" information.

This way even when "an instance goes down" (say, instance admin has lost their private key or something like that), its stuff will still be replicated.

One can even make "an instance" inherit another instance (again, instance admin has lost their private key or, say, someone has stolen it), so that its users would replicate that.

One can imagine many mechanisms on top of that. But what's described would allow libraries and allows a thing similar to DNS (again, like a community, to which you subscribe for naming service that associates names with entities) and a thing similar to a static website, and something like Usenet with user identities, moderation and communities.

Dynamic websites are possible too - but I'm not really knowledgeable about smart contracts and such required for it.

I'm actually describing something in the middle of a few things far smarter people are already doing.

This would allow agility between social and technical solutions.

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.

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.

Love that last line. Will remember.

Yes, selfhost most essential services like mail, messengers, web search, piped frontend, vpn, and other things like gitea/forgejo and jellyfin, web 3.0 will be federated network

TIL - there is something called Gopher and Gemini. Looks interesting, will read more on it.

This pretty much. It got 'civilized'

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.

Indeed, Reddit was a great example of this. All of the stupid things they tried to pull off in the past few years (selling user data, turning off the API, insulting their users, VPN blocking, to name a few) would have not worked when they were a growing website. Now that they have so many low quality users, they can do that successfully because they know that said users are too dumb to realize how they're being abused. Even larger websites like Twitter and Facebook operate this way.

The takeaway here is: don't focus on having many users, focus on having good users. All relationships are a two-way street, and if you're on the side of the street with too many people, you don't have any personal leverage on your own. It's in your best interests to get out of that relationship.

Cyberpunk, let’s go 😂

neocities

this is very nice thank you

Oh my gosh, there's webrings! That used to be such a good way to find new websites in a given topic.

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

https://wiby.me/surprise/

we’re a smaller part

Quality trumps quantity anytime.

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.

Globalization ruined it.

Not like in politics (though similar), but in the sense that instead of a space of generally sane people where you don't have to follow any conventions of fashion or social expectations of idiots, like a park where people sit in grass and eat sandwiches, it has turned into something like a mall built in place of that park, with guards, ads, bullshit and shopping apes.

There definitely was trash. You just didn't have to see it. You'd not go to a central recommendations system, like in social nets or search engines. You'd go to web directories and your friends. Like for many things you still do.

Now there's the fake social pressure of being on corporate platforms. Why fake? Because you still really need and talk to the same amount people you would back then, even fewer.

That fake social pressure was their killer invention. Human psychology is unprepared for critically evaluating the emotions from being able to scroll through half the world of other people right now. They don't generally use that seemingly easy ability to reach anyone anywhere, while when it was a bit harder, they would, but the fake feeling of having it is very strong.

It's a mouse trap.

can we go back?

No!

I agree to an extent, but the problem is not so much the normies themselves as it is the massive commercial market they represent. You might point to mainstream social media as evidence of a problem with the people themselves, but you would be overlooking the fact that the surveillance and attention economies have meant these social media platforms are deliberately designed to position people against one another to drive engagement so these companies can charge more to advertisers. Discourse on the internet isn't getting worse because there are more bad people online, it's getting worse because companies have a financial incentive to turn us into bad people when we are online.

The normies are not the problem, they are the victims. The abusers are the giant corporation manipulating the masses and monetizing a publicly funded infrastructure for their own gains.

We're in Eternal September now. Have been for a few decades.

Return the internet to the pre-"smart" phone era, in which a minimum bar of effort and knowledge needed to be present in order to connect and participate on the web.

Yeah. I think that's happening now. The public will discover the Fediverse, but I'm not sure if they'll be welcomed into every community here.

How about BBSs? If you want to spam at 1200 baud, you had better be dedicated.

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!)

Well, actually:

When Online Content Disappears

"38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later"

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.

Woof. I forgot that used to be a thing. I’m pretty sure I had a phonebook those 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.

Not really needed with dynamic DNS able to point back to a web server on your own network.

Many ISPs still give an email address.

Still is 😉

So far we’re doing a great job at keeping profits out of the equation. Let’s see if it lasts.

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