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?
In the early days the internet was a free, egalitarian space for anyone to surf. Now, commercial interests rule – but users do still have some control.
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.
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.
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.
Fyi, there’s a portal site: gemini://medusae.space/
(http version if you’re not on gemini yet)
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)
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.
2 ways to go back:
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Corporations become less greedy.
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Consumers and businesses stop tolerating abuse and consider other options that will temporarily inconvenience them.
Neither one seems likely. If it were we simply wouldn't be here in the first place.
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.
That's great but it takes more than 1, or even 1M people. It has to be enough people that anti-consumer shitfuckery is no longer profitable.
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How can we go back? We're already on the way back. It's called the Fediverse.
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
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.
Step up!
Create!
It's not unless you are operating your own instance.
Or at the least, avoid the major instances and use smaller instances from individuals.
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.
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.
The point isn't "it's their fault". But it changes the dynamic.
An enthusiast community can, for good and bad, largely self regulate. It's easier to keep corporate interests either out, or engaging on your terms.
Once the community grows to include a high enough proportion of casual participants, that ability goes away, because manipulations that don't work on inquisitive expert audiences do work on less informed ones, and less willing to question. It's harder to establish who actually knows what they're talking about by reputation, it's harder to weed out the trolls from the naive, and it's just generally harder to keep the focus of the community where you want it to be.
Corporations are one of the groups of bad actors manipulating that difference in dynamics, but the dynamics are different because of the large influx of people who don't understand as much and aren't trying to.
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.
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.
How did we get here
Money!
can we go back?
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.
we’re a smaller part
Quality trumps quantity anytime.
Oh absolutely. I exclusively use Lemmy now for social media, my online experience is absolutely amazing as a result. My love for the internet has returned
Quality through obfuscation... make it harder to use. If the dimwits can't figure out how to use it...
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.)
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.
There's a lot to be said for "http://yourISP.com/~username" being available 24/7 at no particular effort to you.
Archive the entire thing and start over.
needs enshitfication vaccination, if we can make it
So far we’re doing a great job at keeping profits out of the equation. Let’s see if it lasts.
Betteridge's law of headlines. Any headline that ends with a question the answer is always no.