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

How can we go back? We're already on the way back. It's called the Fediverse.

Permanently Deleted

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)

How did we get here? Adtech, tracking, monetization.

Can we go back? By removing the ubiquitous affiliate marketing financial incentives, so no.

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.

can we go back

no

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

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!

When you remove the barriers to entry, the average quality users decreases, leading to an increase of corporate interest in an attempt to market to them all. These corporations do not care about the environment, and they run what the masses haven't yet trashed in order to commodify it for maximum profit.

First the planet, then the Internet, next who knows? Maybe the entire human genome. Soon everyone will have to pay to remove dream ads and there will be a paywall inhibiting serotonin production without a subscription.

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.

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.

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.

I think monetization ruined it. There's a lot more trash to sift through.

How did we get here

Money!

The genie is already out of the bottle BUT, one solution would be to raise the barrier to entry again.

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.

In 2008~2010, the flood gates opened for all the normies to stampede in and everything has been downhill since then.

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).

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.)

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.

Usenet was the best.

Archive the entire thing and start over.

Quality through obfuscation... make it harder to use. If the dimwits can't figure out how to use it...

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.

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.

Betteridge's law of headlines. Any headline that ends with a question the answer is always no.

I think clearnet is done for. Maybe something like i2p could be worth investing time into.

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.

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.

It's because the censorship - Biden Administration even changed the Free Internet manifesto and tried in 2022 to shutdown the whole Internet... 😕

https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-closing-of-the-internet-mind/