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Comment by nanomonkey | Hacker News Reader

The author hasn't come across the decentralized web (ie scuttlebutt or dat). That's where I've found all the personalized interesting content.

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pls help me get online, nerd

Seriouspost: Agree with all that’s been said. Corporations have turned the web into an unpalatable wasteland. The prospect of someone finding out my name and job has taken all the joy out of calling someone a fuckhead online. I want to find it again.

I will start searching, but the good communities I’ve found have been invite only.

Did your joy of calling someone else something bad remove the joy for everyone else?

In a small enough community, the Boy Who Cried Wolf remains a pertinent tale.

If you had the reputation as a decent and polite poster, the sudden use of a vile cuss, judiciously applied, yielded far greater aggregate results than someone who used them all the time. At the very least, you would save it for someone who really did deserve it.

Perhaps the sanding off of the web’s edges is simply a product of its size. Maybe we should go back to Usenet.

Believe it or not, there are a few of us out there who grew up on the web calling each other shitheads in both endearing and insulting ways. It was certainly in the spirit of earlier Internet communities.

Most people strongly prefer to hire their friends, so there aren't many social spaces anymore. And if you're lucky enough to get a job in the industry at all, someone might try to get you run out of the industry for violating whichever ornate Versailles-like code of etiquette they carry around in their head. Or just because they don't like you.

I'd like to get involved in the indie-web stuff but it's pretty hard to do when I have to not only stay anonymous but ensure that none of my anonymous web presences can be connected to any of my other anonymous web presences.

I mean, I'd also like a job that pays more than $15/hr and doesn't involve lifting boxes for eleven hours a day, but it's also pretty hard to do that when etc., because all professional spaces are also social spaces and if you can't social with the calculation of a Parisian courtier, well.

Scuttlebutt is as anonymous as you make it. That being said, people tend to not tolerate insensitive name calling much, and will likely block your feed from being replicated by their client, if they find your contributions annoying. But that's sort of the point of taking back distribution, you get to pay attention to what you find worthwhile.

This is something I remember noticing when messing with zeronet. There were no big players and no search engines but a sea of random shit people had hacked together and you would just follow links around to the other weird things people made. This kind of stuff all still exists in the greater internet but it's so easily lost under the megawebsites.

> all the personalized interesting content

Can you name a few topics? As a new user I can find any useful content.

I'm not sure which platform you're using. Solarpunk is a favorite of mine on Scuttlebutt.

Can you expand a bit more on this? How do you find content on these decentralized services?

Scuttlebutt is a gossip protocol, so you are essentially connected to content through friends of friends. I started by downloading Patchwork, one of SSB's clients, and going to local hackerspaces and following whomever was on the network. After that I could branch out and find other people that seemed interesting. After awhile you're pretty much connected to the whole ecosystem and you have to start pruning connections to keep the content at sane levels.

Dat and IPFS is similar in that you get Beaker Browser and then slowly start building up a community of people you know that create content for it.

So, out of the box you are only going to have the kind of people on the network that go to hackerspaces, and they will only post the kinds of things that they would like the people that met them at a hackerspace to see?

Well, those are the things I'm interested in, so that is where I started. Gossip networks have to grow organically as they are decentralized and based off of connections. Just like the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, it doesn't take long before you branch out to everyone on a network.

I personally don't like being in a filter bubble, so I follow as many people as I encounter and try support as many interests as possible to flourish. But eventually the content has to be created by someone with interest, and that person has to be also aware and interested in the decentralized platform, so yes, the first content will likely be centered around tech, programming, or groups that looking for safe space outside of centralized social media.

When I tried zeronet people would make pages with links to all the cool stuff they had found so you could jump from page to page following links to find more stuff. It looks like what I have seen about the start of the internet before real search engines.

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