How to make the internet small again
raptitude.com
raptitude.com
Perhaps the author is more extroverted than me (almost certainly, actually), but I find this interesting. What attracted me to the internet as a kid in the early 2000s was just how huge it was even then.
Sure, you had to go looking for stuff rather than having it shovelled in front of you en masse, but there was such an enormous world of weird little creations that had nowhere else to exist. Stuff to see and people to speak to that I simply never would be able to otherwise.
It's not the internet itself being small, rather your exposure to it. In simpler times, you'd lead your normal "offline" life during the day and then at night one would have "computer time".
Now life is pretty much only "computer time", all day long.
I still remember this unconscious 'reaching out' to strangers in public (now all in their little bubbles, on their phones). I still kind of find myself expecting to meet some of the online figures in real life, to ground their wild claims of importance and glamour in my physical reality (which will never happen). With these experiences, making the internet small again might be possible.
Not so for this generation: The internet can only be big. That one bad tweet is reality, right there on the phone on the nightstand, always-on. There is no way to switch it off, to walk away, to go 'outside'. To find meaning, purpose, answers they have to go out and sift through it all. To find peace, that place needs to be sanitized. Sorry, those "weird little creations" will have to go...
Memes could easily go viral on big decentralized platforms like Usenet, even in the early days. And their real-world impact increased gradually over the 1990s and 2000s, before reaching current levels with the mainstream adoption of smart mobile phones for Internet access, and big social media sites "pivoting" to take advantage of such.
Things didn't have societal impact, but viral was things were there at least since the 90's. Normally dumb jokes like that email propagating virus that instructed you to scratch all your disks and forward the email to all your contacts.
I'm guessing you weren't online in the CompuServe era? Never been on Usenet for anything other than modern-day piracy?
More modern pre-social media example, YTMND was 2001.
These days, doing that gives the impression that the only options for random surfing are porn, SaaS businesses, and ad-filled parking pages. The porn and parking pages have always been with us: it's the directly commercial nature of the remains that soured me from surfing like I did in middle school.
It has definitely brought adventure back to the internet for me instead of the YouTube algorithm kicking my ass every day recommending stuff that I NEED to watch.
Once you set up sacc, cgnml, and nsxiv for pictures, (and maybe moc for music) there's nothing much more to save.
On hw basis, maybe an RPI B+ with a tiny display. Done.
Upon reading some more about Gemini though - especially solderpunk's "ponderings" phlog entries (https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?=zaibatsu.circumlunar....) that I grew to appreicate where gemini came from - a considered criticism of where gopher has not aged well. Gemini has grown to address some of those short comings and that is actually quite nice, and the main driving force for it came from an active user of gopher already so that seemed nice.
What I do find a bit annoying is gemini-the-protocol vs gemini-the-philosophy. E.g. there was a client (I forget the details - sorry) that introduced the concept of a unicode "favicon" and a few people lost their shit about it. Nothing was wrong with the favicon thing - it was totally legit use of the gemini protocol but people were angry about just the concept of a client making requests that they felt did not fit their view of what gemini "means", with various threats about blocking all users/IPs that made requests for a favicon etc.
I find this viewpoint from "small internet" proponents fairly sad and annoying. If the protocol allows it, who are they to say what is right or proper and what is not? It makes me want to write a gemini client that supports styling and some sort of "GeminiObjectModel" and javascript support purely out of principle/trolling-lolz :-)
Here's the whole story: https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora/issues/19...
I wish the ML archive linked down there weren't dead, sigh.
High speed wipes out distances and dramatically increases pressure. Both in real (topology!) and cyber.
For the best - and cheapest - bandwidth: total deregulation of telcos. Like what happened in Romania, which has the cheapest and best connectivity of any European country. Which really isn't what you'd expect.
Less cable-meters mean less reachable households per DSLAM. And the DSLAM costs - both hardware and maintenance. Regardless if 2 or 20 customers connect. So the carrier wants to conect as many as possible and so they have to suffer cable length.
Or the way round: website obesitiy crisis[1] makes fiber copper!
It's quite healthy, and I absolutely encourage it for anyone interested in the space to better understand their online usage and such.
A simple cryptographic signature that takes, say, 1 hour on commodity hardware to calculate. Good bye SEO spam.
We communicate via IRC/Signal, code via Git, and share knowledge via blogs, Mastodon, and talks.
It feels small and nice.
The fact that the rest of the Internet has grown into a different direction doesn't change that.
The pie is now bigger and largely corporate driven, and I'm okay not being part of that.
Is that so bad?
The irony to me is I would think curating a website like that is as big a problem as anything. That is going to take up way too much time and space in your brain.
Get rid of the blog, Netflix and social media then most the problems will go away.
No one is doomscrolling arXiv.
I find the opposite, actually. I use my blog to offload projects from my brain, knowing that if there was anything weird about whatever project I'm doing, I would have documented it in the writeup. So it's a public presence, but also an external storage for projects. I frequently use it for my own reference later, and at least some other people read it too.
There use to be a guy on youtube who decided to document his dreams as they were getting surprisingly weird. He would fly out of his body towards the sun where many kinds of creatures lived. They had invited him, had incredibly long life spans and vastly superior intellect. When he brought up their intelligence they laughed and said there were many species with much greater intellect than theirs, above them many layers with more and more intelligent species. Each would feel dumb by comparison with the layer above. "We are undeveloped enough to show an interest in humans." Those above look at you like you look at ants. They then took him to an artifact or learning device left behind by truly sophisticated life forms. It looked like a book to him because humans think of books as containers of knowledge. He was allowed to look at the book from far far away and told not to get closer. His mind raged with thoughts and visions. What happens if I get closer? Then the book absorbs you. You will acquire so much information you wont be able to recall what little you knew before today. You would no longer exist. Only a few of the sun dwellers got close enough to touch it but it took hundreds of years to let the information sink in.
No URL text field where you can type in a different address — perhaps a just back button. In other words, a wildly gimped web browser to keep my surfing much, much more focused.
I have no idea if I can trust myself to stick to just launching that app in the morning, leaving aside the standard browser. I'm not sure if a diet of only HN is smart or right or would make me happier.
Just a thought I've had.
Though, through it I found that Neocities has a great “indie web” community. Good for them.
For those thinking of trying this experiment, I would recommend briefing your whole social circle beforehand.