We need to rewild the internet
noemamag.com
noemamag.com
Downside of being a one man show is I only have so much attention to spend on tasks, so sometimes quality tuning gets a bit neglected.
I'm not sure what went wrong with StumbleUpon; it worked well from the user end of things.
I have a keyboard shortcut that opens moonjump.app/jump, which will redirect to a random site
It gives me that control that I want, and I don't have to worry about Meta, etc trying to monetize it. Plus I get to unplug from those "n liked your post" dopamine hits.
People would like to find genuine ones instead of just cash grabs.
And I made the site simple and contrary to current Web on purpose: plain HTML, no JS, no popups, only graphics are photos and diagrams.
It's surprising* that rolling your own on the web has gotten harder, not easier, in the last 20 years. But it has.
*Surprising in the narrow sense that technology usually improves. I know all too well why lone sites don't do well on the web.
So what do they do instead? They type <granddaughter's name> into their browser, and then call me asking if they should buy McAfee because the computer says they have a virus.
I agree that search engines are not the only way to reach content on the web (web != social networks). But for most people today, they are.
I love sharing those with friends and family. But I hate the opaque algorithms on social media sites that are tuned to prioritize engagement & time spent on the service. I find that these algos are rewarding rage bait due to their engagement farming.
Sharing with those that I want to share with, in an environment free of algorithms and capitalistic intentions provides that validation. And having a random site visitor here and there who enjoys what I have to say is just icing on the cake.
As I get older, I realize that we were never meant to have 10,000 people looking at what we ate for lunch, or the mess our cat made while we were at work. Interactions like that back in the 1500s would have made us more influential than Kings. A close-knit community that cherishes the expression of all our oddities, curiosities, and hobbies is something that just can't be replicated in current social media.
Of course, if you have no interest in sharing your passions, don't do it. Your free time is valuable and you should only use it for things that you value.
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|may I please have points, too sir?
Jimi Hendrix "If 6 was 9", 1967: "If all the hippies cut off all their hair I don't care, I don't care... White collar Windows users, flashin down the street pointing their plastic finger at me, hoping soon my kind will drop and die: I'm gonna wave my freak flag high!"
That's a missing piece of the puzzle for the distributed web; curation and recommendation are ad-hoc and don't scale.
It feels like a chicken and egg problem to me -- realistically you need to meet people where they're at and appeal to the current channels' algorithms to get your content discovered, but in doing so you also reinforce the strength of the walled garden itself and participate in the diminishment of both search and the "wild" internet at large.
Something durable, censorship-resistant, network-agnostic, optionally trust-based. Maybe a bit of IPFS + i2p + content-adressable, composable, cross-linkable, multimedia documents + federated services? I feel the components already mostly exist actually...
When I would say: This is a terrible idea, they just want to control and own the content. a gif you own, a gif you can download and so what ever you wanted, etc. boy was I down voted into oblivion.
One of the reasons for this is many posts aren't on hacker news by accident, they are hidden advertisements. Chances are, you got the karma to downvote people. Just starting off at -1 is a disadvantage.
You can try it too: just disagree with what an article says in the comments, 99% of the time you will be downvoted. Agree and you get free karma. This is not always the case, but generally is.
obligatory https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
For example, host your own mail.
Do people host their own webservers anymore? (is a VPS is good enough?)
IRC? muds?
The rise of smartphones made "computing" accessible to everyone, but people can't actually compute.
Computers used to come with a language. You could write your own programs and run them from the getgo. You didn't have to ask permission to digitally sign your own program and run it.
Ugh, yeah, good luck on this one. You can get by quite well using one of the major providers as an (outbound-only, if desired) gateway though.
> Do people host their own webservers anymore? (is a VPS is good enough?)
Yes and yes but mostly it's Docker hell
> IRC? muds?
They're both still around, albeit a shadow of their former selves. IRC is better than ever, use a client like The Lounge and it's basically(*) a modern chat app.
(* Okay, stuff like multi-line and message editing are still effectively missing, but you get embeds and whatnot)
"Internet never forgets" is one of these naive fairytales we told ourselves when we were young and internet was new, along with "information wants to be free", "censorship on the internet is impossible", and "easy access to information helps democracy".
I prefer open web for sentimental reasons, but I don't think it's naturally better at preserving the information than walled gardens.
Some will disappear. Others are maintained, sometimes by third parties. Many of them are on web.archive.org. Yes, we should build better solutions to retain random personal webpages but the sitations isn't really that dire.
> "Internet never forgets"
This has alwasy been in the context of things you want the internet to forget and it still holds true.
> "information wants to be free"
And it does - once something leaks it is hard to put it back into the bag.
> "censorship on the internet is impossible"
I don't recall this claim but depending on how you look at things isn't really wrong: Is there any kind of information that you can't find on the internet because someone wants to hide it? Yes, some parts of the web are censored but remember the internet is not just the web and even on the web highly controversial websites can cling to life.
> "easy access to information helps democracy"
It does. Most people do not have easy access to information, at best they have a highly curated selection that the media wants them to see. They could avail themselves to the full picture but are conditioned not to.
So you just put out 10 different lies for every truth you want to cover. Most people won't be bothered to check what is actually true. Human attention span is the limiting factor of modern world, not the access to information. Lying to people is easier than ever before in history, so democracy is in fact getting worse over time.
I made this discovery after going to post a novel solution for getting into the hood with a seized hood release in hopes that it might spare someone else some trouble in the future.
All things are not in the moment. Sometimes it's good to learn from the past.
Note, that isn't the same as an ambitious fully federated mesh network or anything, but being limited in certain ways makes it efficient and easier in others.
Any millennial or nerdy Xer with a good memory would tell you what the deal is. We were the first ones who came of age online, and saw what the Internet was like when it came to prominence. Now, our libraries, town halls, and weird gardens are all ash. Try to surf like you did in 2010 and all you'll see is spam; the filters work in reverse now. Log in to what "social media" is these days (after filling in your phone number and uploading your driver's license) and it's just cable TV with some extra widgets.
At least Wikipedia is still there.
https://www.paulmorellimusic.com/notes-on-chicago-transit-au...
On the one hand, I prefer the old open web. On the other, I can’t deny the existence and value of these walled gardens. The wall doesn’t erase the value, even if I strongly prefer there wasn’t a wall to begin with.
To your point, discord comes with downsides, and does raise questions about the longevity of the content. Most of the old web disappeared too.
I think that in order to have any hope of returning to something more open and public on a wider scale, it’s necessary to understand why these communities are thriving on discord. I don’t have the answer to that question, but I suspect that the wall is actually a benefit to some.
This is always multiply determined, but part of the answer is that Discord and these other walled gardens are subsidized by VC funding with the expectation that at some point they'll turn on the garbage compactor and squeeze out the juicy value.
Seeing this now makes me wonder if it’s more to do with life in general.
It has no interest in offering you exactly what you want, it wants to maximize your time “hoping” the next video will be very good, which eventually happens (if you sunk enough time).
I have less than 3k of personal websites.
Data are in the repository.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
I still rely on google for many things, or kagi. It is interesting to me, what my crawler finds next. It is always a surprise to see new blog, or forgotten forum of sorts.
This is how I discover real new content on the Internet. Certainly not by google which can find only BBC, or techcrunch.
It is extraordinarily difficult for me to believe this is indicative of the reality of the entire Internet. I've probably visited a good chunk of this amount of personal sites.
Personal recommendation algorithms using RL, are certainly possible, because RL is the least computationally intensive training, compared to supervised, unsupervised etc. They also require some kind of social structure, but that will be setup on a blockchain, in an totally open and transparent way, yet private.
With just a google search i did, medium + recommendation algorithm this article appeared [1].
Also if you haven't tried medium's recommendation engine, i strongly suggest making an account and ticking a box somewhere for email recommendations.
[1] https://utsavdesai26.medium.com/recommendation-systems-expla...
If everyone ran their own blogs, chats, email, etc. and let their systems federate thru protocol rather than on a single platform, the forests will thrive again.
The often maligned “setup wizard” UI a lot of us remember from not so long ago actually was kinda neat in many ways.
Run “I want a website app” and click through a few simple menus that ask you questions to get you set up with a domain, email, hosting, etc. The defaults would be a selection of ideally smaller/non-FAANG providers, with some power-user menu or some shit gated behind a checkbox.
Then it just saves a document with your new CMS/etc logins, and away you go.
I guess you could even make a few bucks off it by using referral codes or whatever to fund development cost.
True, in the literal sense that you will have to administrate your own system, but I'm sure there must be ways to make this easier for people. Perhaps small computers that come pre-configured with the correct specifications for being a good small-scale server and pre-installed with software that provides a simple web GUI dashboard that you can just drop files on and it will serve them up for you, with everything else taken care of under the hood.
> applying software updates all the time
With image based distros, containers, and their respective auto-updating schemes, this — and the concomitant problems updates may bring given the extensive and hairy state of most systems — should hopefully become a thing of the past.
> patching emergency security vulnerabilities
I mean, unless you are running something that is incredibly visible online and linked to you from a lot of places or used by a lot of people and so you need to take extreme extra security steps, shouldn't this be taken care of by just regularly updating your software? For a small scale self-hosted blog or personal email server this seems a hardly proportional.
> hardening services against constant attacks
Again, it seems like you are projecting the requirements of a much larger scale endeavor onto small-scale personal self hosting of a blog or email server only you use. And to the degree that system hardening is necessary for a small cell posted system, once again image-based operating systems with hardened Pam authentication rules that run everything in rootless podman containers and keep SELinux enabled should be more than hard enough and all that can be configured and set up upstream to the user.
> deciding whether the daily "I have found a bug in your system and will disclose" mails are legitimate threats
What are you even talking about here? For the third time, it seems like you are projecting the requirements of a much larger scale thing onto small-scale personal self hosting.
> If you fail at any of these tasks, relatively new regulations mean various governments can fine you more than your net worth over failing to report a data breach to the right agency on the right timeline
A data breach? On a small self-hosted blog or email server? Who's data would those regulations be punishing you for leaking, your own, maybe two freinds'? And those regulations, if you are speaking about the ones in the EU that I am thinking of, have pretty clear cut offs and requirements and stuff that really wouldn't apply to someone's little self-hosted thing.
Great minds think alike. See FreedomBox[1] for a totally FOSS implementation of that idea; one of my friends runs all of his internet services at home with it: email, file storage, contacts synchronisation etc.
Say you host your own WordPress blog with comments enabled. A few of your posts get to the front page of Hacker News, and you collect a couple hundred comments from California techies. Your WordPress instance is breached because you didn't patch a zero day vulnerability quickly enough. You have to personally notify every California resident of the breach, and California's Attorney General.
Government regulation means that part of your job in self-hosting a simple blog is knowing that CCPA exists, along with every similar regulation passed by every other state, now and into the future.
Worse, you may not even realize you're holding regulated "personal data" and how much. Maybe you try to avoid this liability by turning off comments and uploads, but you don't realize your web server has access logs enabled, and some state or country considers this personal data as well. GDPR does for one.
The possibility of this is less than 1% purely due to commenting friction. Hacker News already has a comment section. No one's going to sign up for a Wordpress account in order to post their comments there.
And if one doesn't?
I just want to let someone or some group handle that for me.
I would love if I could pay a "gardener" to maintain my self-hosted stuff. My hardware (that's one hobby!), my bandwidth, my choice of non-invasive species (informed by consultation with the gardener, which ones they'd like to maintain), but ultimately someone else does the planting, the weeding, the single sign-on integration, the updates.
Maybe just don't overcomplicate things and you won't need to hire a gardener. A static website is not that hard and you can minimize how much infrastructure you need to maintain yourself to pretty much zero.
Self host at home should be much more common than it is…
It violates your ISP's EULA and they'll shut you down. Unless of course you pay twice as much (for the same service) with a "business" account.
But I think the problem quickly turns to over-fragmentation, even with something like matrix, mastodon or lemmy today, there are so many different instances and many of them are blocking several other instances from federating with them, people don't know where to go and have too many different places to look for stuff that they simply won't even try.
This isn't a unique phenomenon. Look at video games. When any subculture/industry goes mainstream you don't see it preserving the thriving ecosystem of before and just adding on a synergistic mainstream bloc. Rather, the mainstream bloc cannibalizes and leaves dwindling ghost towns. That's the price of attention competition and opportunity cost.
1. The Neocities random page: https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=random
2. The Neocities recently updated page: https://neocities.org/activity
3. Status Cafe: https://status.cafe/
4. The MidnightPub: https://midnight.pub/
I also wonder what would their point of view be if the internet truly was wilder, like 4chan or everything behind TOR.
On one hand, I kind of like the idea of spreading and atomizing the internet to the masses, a bit like it was at the beginning, but at the beginning the people that were part of the internet were a particularly well educated elite. It was definitely not for everyone.
Not everyone was online, what we had was people with disposable income to have a computer, usually with some form of college education and some technical knowledge.
Then the masses came, and social media thrived.
It's nothing like GPT IMO; it's opinionated, for one thing. I think it's just hard to follow because it does draw from a large variety of sources and ideas and doesn't weave them together very smoothly. This is showcased with the horrible modern trend of displaying a large quote of something the article literally just said, or will say next. This practice is always a bad choice, but failure scales with the complexity of the article; the author would have done better to use more headings, which would help them organize the work.
I do completely agree with your assessment of why the earlier internet was... a more rewarding experience. (I don't think "better" is a meaningful term here.) But, the article is explicitly rejecting the idea of returning to the past, and instead building something new that fosters emergent behavior and diversity. The goal is empowerment of agents who have a will to cultivate their ideas.
I kind of found a similar vibe in some discord servers, but they're much more difficult to join as a new user than a forum because old information isn't easily searchable and discussions aren't as longform as old forum posts were.
I don't think they were referring to moderation in itself. 4chan isn't a decentralized platform like the Fediverse (AFAIK), so, if it was theoretically large enough (like, TikTok-sized), it would be just as big a problem.
They demonstrated the ready willingness use of violence by special interest groups bankrolling and giving insider trading tips to your political leaders. Meanwhile some college student torrents some Hollywood movie and gets arrested.
ex) Megaupload
Luckily my analogy isn’t a very good one, the Internet is nothing like Detroit. It is, however, interesting how quickly wild things can be tamed, and that may beckon a cautionary lesson.
I really agree. so often simplification alone is not enough. it should be a guiding principle, but not ignorant of the necessary complexity
If you think of hypertext as a medium, it's been pushed to its most logical extreme already. There's not a lot of boundaries to explore.
There are weird places online already, sure. And curiosities still abound. But idk… I wonder if a generation lost in cyberspace is exactly the reason why we are actually so unhappy with the internet writ large.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
I think this is an odd framing. It's not about pushing things to further extremes, it's about using all these mediums that have been allowed to wither and die. It's about getting out of the sterile high-walled gardens.
Let's take LiveJournal or MySpace… those services arose out of an interesting time when the metaphor of daily posting on the web was novel to a lot of people. Sharing photos on the web was novel so Flickr was created. During these times, folks are figuring out the design patterns of the web that get crafted in HTML/CSS/JS and now they've all but been standardized and commodified by Meta et al.
There's a reason that our society has allowed <10 companies to own the internet: the internet is content. Anyone who can claim to "own" content has the right to monopolize it. We didn't simply allow corporations to build walls of garden around us: we enshrined those walls as a legal right!
This article opens with a great metaphor, comparing the internet to a forest. Let's continue that metaphor, and see how copyright fits in. What is a tree made of? Content. Copyright doesn't simply give someone ownership of their garden, it gives them ownership of entire species. Want to grow an Apple tree? Too bad: you don't have the right to copy Apple's species. Want to pollinate your gnu tree with an Apple tree? No can do: Apple trees were intentionally designed to be incompatible with free range bees.
Every thing we do on the internet is carefully managed with contracts centered around copyright. Giant corporations own nearly all the copy rights. Is it any surprise that they write all the contracts?
We need to rewild the internet; and to do that, we (and our peers) will need seeds.
Then comment bot spam started growing out of control, webmasters ceded the comment platform to centralized services like Disqus, and finally Google slashed ad premiums, so websites either started disappearing or getting folded into the properties of 'blog networks' and lost their personality in search of pageviews.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060902030402fw_/http://www.stu...
I swear search engines are getting borderline useless. And it's not necessarily their fault, it's just very difficult to find search results these days that aren't lists of affiliate links. And in fairness, this is probably less to do with SEO'ers "gaming" the system and more to do with the fact that all of the content we actually cared about just disappeared behind walled gardens.
I abandoned Google Search a few years ago because I was tired of it trying to guess what I was "really" trying to search for instead of just matching my keywords. But DuckDuckGo seems to be getting worse in this regard lately too. I will get a bunch of results that are about something I don't care about, identify a keyword that I could easily filter out and add the "-<keyword>" modifier to my search string only to see it have no effect what-so-ever. Grrr....
I also can't believe the amount of search results that take you to a walled garden. Instagram for example. You can't lurk without an account and every single time I've tried to create an account it gets automatically suspended after a few days because their system flags it as a "fake account", whatever that means. It used to mean a bot but I can easily prove that I'm a real human being and yet when I've appealed the suspension it has stuck. So it blows my mind that they rank so highly in the search results despite doing everything they can to prevent people without accounts from even being able to create accounts, let alone browse those results.
The Web is dead.
Absolutely.
Like with anything else, you literally get what you pay for. Free search services like Google and DuckDuckgo indeed suck. I pay for Kagi, and have a wonderful search experience. I seldom have trouble finding anything. Once in a while I use someone else's computer and have to use Google. What a jarring, unpleasant experience.
I don't know what people on Hacker News are doing that they can never seem to find a single useful result on any search engine, ever.
It feels like the search engine used to accept whatever I typed and used that to query. The results had to be a good match for all the words in my query. This made it very easy to find exactly what I was looking for.
Now google feels free to ignore terms from my query or to use synonyms instead of the exact term. The results are now exceptionally broad and no longer are a good match for the specific query I've entered. I now have to use "quotes" "around" "every" "single" "term" or go several pages deep to find the page I want.
1. In google, I get 9 results, none of which are a reference to the W3C XQuery/XPath issue. This is because google is actually "helpfully" searching for "xq31 curly array constructor does not use enclosed expr" -- telling it to not do that finds the issue, returning two results.
2. In bing, the bug report (bug 29989) is the top result.
3. In DuckDuckGo, it is also the top result.
I've had other problems searching google for specific error messages as it decides to remove quoting, tends to show results for space-separated compound identifiers (see the "curly array constructor" in what google searches for by default), does word stemming, and other "helpful" transformations on the search.
The reality is there is far more creative and well produced content on the web and closed platforms today than there ever was in any other point in time. And if you can't find it fast enough, AI can generate direct, customized answers.
For example, a search for "how do I repair widget X" will inevitable take me to a garbage SEO site following the same patterns. The internet is less useful today than it was 10 years ago. Probably it peaked 20 years ago, before big money completely took over and ruined the place.
Also you can ask almost any LLM model for that type of answer and get it instantly and personalized.
Why is hacker news full of so much outdated thinking?
Related to this is the dumbing down of query input. Like, in many cases, even using double quotes around search terms doesn't guarantee that the page that will be shown in search results actually contains the quoted word anywhere. I've had one case where Google would helpfully find articles talking only about Linux given a query like '"freebsd" foo bar' (and where it showed the snippets for them, highlighting the phrase it treated as a match, it would say 'linux foo bar', so you could tell right away what exactly was substituted).
It used to be a power tool that had well-defined knobs and buttons that you could master to find exactly what you want. Now it's a magic wand that tends to do something inscrutable every time you wave it, and you "master" it by flailing around until it kinda sorta does what you want.
Sure we have Youtube and streaming now. But streaming today is just cable TV by another name. You could subscribe to them all and still not have the selection that a Blockbuster or torrent tracker would.
And they never give specific examples either.
This is a general principle of optimization, which maximises efficiency at the expense of redundancy and anti-fragility. Unfortunately, the ability to withstand an unexpected catastrophe does not appear on a balance sheet until the catastrophe strikes.
It does not need to "return" to FTP because FTP is still in use. Periodically I am submitting examples of FTP servers to HN that are still operated today that are often critical to software developers and so-called "tech" companies.
And even people with weird myspace style social networking sites like https://spacehey.com/browse
Then there's telegram and discord, full of all kinds of strange stuff.
They're just not mainstream. Probably better that way.
Punk rock died when the first kid said
"Punk's not dead, punk's not dead"
I think these have inspirational historical bases as opposed to being renfairs.
They are in the hands of a younger generation.
I was just about to say this. The new pockets of internet communities are filled with interesting and fun things again. It’s just that a lot of them are for and run by teenagers. As adults, we either feel immediately out of place or just get banned outright.
The ones run by adults are incredibly niche focusing on “non-mainstream” interests.
Discovery is a little harder, yes. And it feels more ephemeral than the static sites of yore. But they’re out there. And they thrive.
And 4chan still exists.
The kids will be alright.
It's fascinating how people born after the decline of myspace has found a clone and helped bring it to life.
---
* maybe it is and a bunch of people are just playing a character ... unlikely though.
If you want to pick a different username, we can rename it for you and unban the account, as long as the username is genuinely neutral.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
This a thousand times over. This should be taught in schools and repeated from the earliest grades to post-grad. It bears repetition, sufficient that it is seen by everyone as obvious. Then, perhaps the society will value complexity and diversity as the true strengths that they are. Homogenizing and monoculture will kill us all, whether it is forestry, agriculture, human cultures, economies, the internet, or mil or corporate orgs. Uniformity is brittleness.
Furthermore, because no browser is totally secure, users are going to avoid non-popular links, perpetuating the walled gardens they already use.
I fear our monoculture of operating systems has to be addressed first, before any of the rest can really take hold.
I’d wager >95% of LTS linux distributions released in the past ten years are still rock-solid if you’re just exposing 22, 80, and 443. Even PHP5 is still de facto bulletproof if you’re paranoid about not trusting user input.
Vulns don’t come out of nowhere.
There are several widely-used OS, one of which (Linux) has plenty of very different versions depending on your usecase. I'm not really sure that counts as a "monoculture"
I regularly update my personal systems, but when I ran FreeBSD for work, we only did kernel and OS updates for important things. Most of our machines would turn on, build and install our latest tested and patched version and reboot, and that would be the last time it rebooted until it was time to recycle it 3-5 years later.
Yeah, I looked at every update, and most of them weren't important enough to upgrade existing working machines; I guess that's active management: I did consider and most often choose to take no action, but it's still not many actions taken. That's not to say FreeBSD is perfect; it's not, there were certainly some updates that needed to go to all machines right quick. Some of the applications we ran on the other hand... It was a great day when we replaced Wordpress, because I was no longer on the hook to spend a day updating that with no notice. I would be ok leaving my current hosting for a year and confident it will be fine when I get back; other than it a disk encryption passphrase to boot after a power incident.
Mostly Linux with minimal software that's mostly finished is fine too; although I won't run it personally anymore, except in OpenWRT and other embedded systems where I don't have much choice.
(Conspiratorial/Systems thinking acknowledged.)
https://twitter.com/reddit_lies/status/1778899250857783731
Now everybody, and every company is online. We're simply drowned in an overwhelming sea of mundane banality. And, frankly - normal, ordinary, every-body stuff. Reading the news. Doing some banking.
It's not that we're not here - it's just that everybody else is here too. The internet is now the place that nobody goes to because it's too crowded.
Some way to "self-host" or "own my own data" isn't very possible in a world of complex system administration and cloud providers, GDPR/Privacy, etc.
Maybe solving this problem (via FOSS, hopefully) and giving people their own internet-in-a-kit could be a good way to go?
Are there active projects like this? Is it even feasible?
If you create a pod and give someone access to information within it, you probably have to assume that they are going to make a copy of it and that they will share this copy with others.
So what’s the point of going to all the trouble of setting it up in the first place?
Users.
Users demonstrate, by their behavior, again and again, that they want simple, they want turnkey, they want inter-operation, and they want stability. And the big corps generally succeed in providing those things. Web 1.0 and most of Web 2.0 was none of those things.
The easiest way to engineer those goals is to consolidate. Consolidated software developed under one roof can use incentive of money to induce engineers to figure out the "grimy" problems to make pieces of the tooling work with each other (such as GMail interoperating with Docs, or Facebook Messenger and Facebook itself). And the centralized dev houses force consolidation; for all the jokes (justifiable) about Google having too many chat options, how does it compare to the world outside their garden? How many people actually go through the hassle to get XMPP inter-operating, since Google dropping support for it didn't mean it actually went away? Not enough. A consolidated dev house doesn't have to have multiple competing social network platforms or image hosts, etc... They can maintain one, maybe float the occasional experiment, and users don't have to worry too much about change.
Users actually hate many kinds of change because they build their lives atop the predictability of systems they don't control and they get angry when those systems are altered without their consent. And to head off the argument "But the FAANGs change shit all the time..." They sure do. Now compare that rate of churn to the rate of churn of how one stands up a web server, or how many non-FAANG online services have come up, run out of money, and evaporated.
Inter-operation, at first glance, is the thing the walled gardens fight against. But ironically, by consolidating to one solution and letting just about everyone on the internet use it, they create an "interior inter-operation" to rival the inter-operation you can get with diverse solutions. Consider how much of Twitter you see doing a Twitter search vs. a Mastodon search, or how easy it is to find your coworkers on LinkedIn vs. finding (and using, successfully, through their spam filters) their email addresses. The single-service, one-API, few-clients model consolidates multiple things that users don't want multiple of... chat clients, search corpuses, histories, administration stories, username / password combinations, privacy policies. And this all carries consequences (get locked out for legitimate or illegitimate reasons and you're now locked out of a very big garden), but they're consequences that hit the few; for the near totality, "it just works."
Regarding stability: Google has been around a quarter of a century at this point. Facebook about two decades. They may not last forever, but users understandably are more likely to stick with them than to try new things. Every new thing is more likely to be a pets-dot-com than the next Amazon, and who has time to build familiarity with someone's bespoke solution just to get that inevitable "We never hoped to have to send this message..." turndown email?
And this all culminates in the lack of proliferation of browsers, because the browser enables all these features and, at the end of the day, no user (rounding for error) wants to run two or more browsers and no web developer (rounding for error) wants to accomodate the undocumented implementation quirks of two or more browsers (quirks that always exist no matter how spec-compliant they are... If they didn't exist, they'd be the same browser). So there's the occasional cry of "Why aren't there dozens of browsers" without anyone really answering who wants that?
Nothing about a "rewilded" net is impossible, but users don't want to do it and don't really want to use it. Not nearly enough to make it into something as big as the consolidated service providers. It's a nice hobby for people who really care about how the machinery works to dabble in (I, too, run a Mastodon node...), but I don't see anything pushing people out of their Facebooks, their Amazons, or their Googles, in the near future.
Not if the alternative is for regular users to have to do more work than they do today.
These are not scions of capitalism. These are anti-competitive ecosystems by design. Having to do more work wouldn’t be a thing if the protocols were designed to aid communication outside of corporate channels. People are afraid, not unwilling. Big brother says it’s not safe, so they go to the cozy sphere they know and regrettably trust with too much of their lives.
It’s a nation state problem too. The US gets economic advantage from having the major players local. It’s hard not to lose ground when a federated system in Sweden or China can chip away at your control base. So we subsidize and solidify. We get temporary advantage for long-term decay and virtual feudalism.
People lived under monarchies for a long time before a streak of luck, war, and land changed it.
I agree, because it was the easiest way to solve the problem of providing value to users. Redundancy and coupling of unrelated implementations is expensive. In the extreme, its O(N^2) expensive if you're going to bridge every separate system. Far easier to just build it once.
> Having to do more work wouldn’t be a thing if the protocols were designed to aid communication outside of corporate channels.
Sure, but rephrasing that would be "if companies did more work at no direct benefit to themselves, it would be easier for people to not use their software." Where is the benefit to them? And if this were easy to do, why hasn't the open source community done it? The only thing stopping them is when they build it, nobody (modulo the rounding error of dyed-in-the-wool computer fans) actually wants to use it.
> It’s not that people don’t want to. They don’t know any better and are addicted... People are afraid, not unwilling. Big brother says it’s not safe, so they go to the cozy sphere they know and regrettably trust with too much of their lives.
I used to believe this. I have come around to the thinking that after spending decades telling people what they should want, maybe I'm wrong and people know what they want better than me.
Mastodon is free and (relatively) easy to install and maintain. Why do people stay on Twitter? It's not because Elon Musk is tricking them.
I think you make a point regarding Big Brother, but it underestimates the benefits of staying in the maintained channels. If someone steals my money out of my bank account, the FDIC makes me whole. Who makes me whole when someone steals my Bitcoin? If Facebook did something illegal to me, they're a big enough target for the FBI to intervene. Who intervenes if my Mastodon admin uses my PII against me? They're judgment-proof, and criminal investigation doesn't enforce on small potataoes like that.
Larger, consolidated firms are bigger targets and easier to keep in line. A lot of crime happens in the ecosystem of small communities not in the spotlight.
> People lived under monarchies for a long time before a streak of luck, war, and land changed it.
People have all the tools to change out of corporate systems right now; they don't because it would make their lives worse, materially. They're not waiting for a savior to walk them off the plantation; they had the option to wander off in the wildnerness and they chose to live (virtually) where people are.
Of course it’s cheaper when you have the government’s backing and tax benefits to help you. The real question is.. cheaper compared to what? There are no other options now.
> Sure, but rephrasing that would be "if companies did more work at no direct benefit to themselves, it would be easier for people to not use their software." Where is the benefit to them? And if this were easy to do, why hasn't the open source community done it? The only thing stopping them is when they build it, nobody (modulo the rounding error of dyed-in-the-wool computer fans) actually wants to use it.
It’s not a fair fight at this point. Google won’t rank those projects higher than they’re legally required to, so not many people see it. They don’t have the propag.. er.. media reach, so they remain an unknown to fear. The big guys release a press snippet and get 90% user coverage. Good will has value, but large companies lose that value proposition once they reach critical mass and can remove “Don’t be evil” from their manifesto. This is a scale and control problem.
> I used to believe this. I have come around to the thinking that after spending decades telling people what they should want, maybe I'm wrong and people know what they want better than me. Mastodon is free and (relatively) easy to install and maintain. Why do people stay on Twitter? It's not because Elon Musk is tricking them. I think you make a point regarding Big Brother, but it underestimates the benefits of staying in the maintained channels. If someone steals my money out of my bank account, the FDIC makes me whole. Who makes me whole when someone steals my Bitcoin? If Facebook did something illegal to me, they're a big enough target for the FBI to intervene. Who intervenes if my Mastodon admin uses my PII against me? They're judgment-proof, and criminal investigation doesn't enforce on small potataoes like that. Larger, consolidated firms are bigger targets and easier to keep in line. A lot of crime happens in the ecosystem of small communities not in the spotlight.
Mastodon kind of sucks right now, to be fair. It’s slow, barely knows what to show, and then switches around posts randomly. Twitter has users, and that has value. It’s easier to setup a centralized posting platform than something community driven. People generally want what is fastest and works. A marginally better platform isn’t worth switching to for most people. People generally want the bare minimum to meet their criteria. The problem is that these are “free” services where the true cost is amortized over time. They know what they want, but they have nothing to gauge with anymore. It’s not like you can compare sticker prices. The price is well hidden. Another issue with safety is that you need a lawyer for digital crime, not a police officer. That’s the barrier. We don’t have well defined law. It’s the slightly less wild west.
> People have all the tools to change out of corporate systems right now; they don't because it would make their lives worse, materially. They're not waiting for a savior to walk them off the plantation; they had the option to wander off in the wildnerness and they chose to live (virtually) where people are.
They’re trained from a young age to admire brands and creators. Few question the sphere they live in; fewer still take action. The tools to leave are inaccessible when you have no free time left after work and family duties. Interop is key to competition now that the reactor is pumping. We don’t have real competition without it. They’re not waiting for a savior because they don’t feel the effects daily beyond a few ads. It’s a slow process that hides the true outcome.
XMPP never went away. Nor did IRC. Nor did USENET.
The entire old Internet is still there, protocol-wise. It is unused because users don't want it; it's clunky, it requires manual maintenance, it just plain doesn't work as well.
> Google won’t rank those projects higher than they’re legally required to, so not many people see it
You don't have to invoke a conspiracy to explain why these projects rank low. Google bases its rankings (primarily) on "interest to users" signals. And they just don't have the interest. It is a chicken-egg problem, but the egg smells. When Facebook has 2 billion daily active users and Mastodon just topped 1.8 million, the naive assumption is that Google 2,000 times as likely to guess if you're talking about "social network," you mean Facebook.
And it's not about propaganda. No amount of propaganda is going to make my mom comfortable running her own Mastodon node, or help her find my grandfather's posts when he's on a different node. Users don't want the complexity. The web used to be more complex and we moved away from that as people.
> Mastodon kind of sucks right now
... and is pretty much the best thing outside the walled gardens.
That's the issue. The wildnerness is full of tigers.
> They’re not waiting for a savior because they don’t feel the effects daily beyond a few ads. It’s a slow process that hides the true outcome.
I think we agree on this but I don't know what you mean by "true outcome." The true outcome is people use the Internet for what they want and then get on with their lives.
That starts in the USA with enforcing the 1st Amendment. If you work for the Government or if your employer accepts Government money in any form, then you can not censor your employees in their private lives.
I can post the most repugnant thing you have ever read, and the 1st Amendment says you can not even discuss it with me at work. That's the way freedom works.
The enshittification of the Internet starts and ends in HR.
The First Amendment overrules State Law.
The First Amendment overrules company policy.
Colleges especially were lousy with IP addresses. They'd assign a routable IP to every computer on their campus, including the ResNets. They also handed out shared disk space on servers because that was new and novel. If you knew the right people you could even get a vanity subdomain on the school's domain.
A significant amount of "wild" Internet content was found on those servers that lived on college campuses. Another significant source of "wild" content was ISP-provided web space. Most ISPs offered a few tens of megabytes of web hosting easily accessed via FTP. A lot of HTML authoring software of the era could publish directly to an FTP account. While the likes of GeoCities and AngelFire get a lot of the nostalgia today, they were far from the only source of garish web pages filled with questionable content.
In the early 00s colleges stopped giving out routable IPs to everything with a NIC and started cracking down on closet servers and web space. Besides the network security angle the MPAA and RIAA were on a tear suing colleges for "hosting" pirated content. ISPs also dropped their shared hosting around the same time. By 2010 all the major free web hosting services had shut down or enshittified to uselessness.
Without those places a lot of "wild" content just died out. People did move to hosted blogs like LiveJournal, Wordpress, or Tumblr but even those weren't the same type of "wild" sites that came before. The "wild" content has been further hurt by Google's algorithms' insistence that only content published in the past ten seconds is worthwhile and even then its only worthwhile if its SEOed to death and has Google Ads running on it.
For the most part people just moved to social media. There's zero need for administration, bandwidth is a non-issue, and publishing is pushing "Post". The downside is its social media and discoverability or even availability outside the platform is challenging or non-existent.
For non-technical people it's extremely difficult to set up a "wild" site on the Internet anymore. Even for the technically inclined it's a thankless pain in the ass to administer and keep up. If you do set something up it becomes a constant battle against spammers and script kiddies. Even just something going viral can get your account suspended or rack up huge egress fees on a cloud provider.
I love the idea of re-wilding the Internet we shouldn't pretend the Internet of today is the same as the Internet of the last century.
Edit: I a word.
And bots.
I posted earlier today:
Anil Dash argues [1] that things can be better in not so wide-open communities.
And then there’s someone like Darius Kazemi, a computer programmer and community organizer who has been patiently toiling away building tools that let others build healthy, constructive, human-scale online communities — the sort that are full of acts of kindness and genuine connection, instead of incessant fights about hate speech. There’s been a huge uptick in interest in Darius’ work as networks like Twitter have fallen apart, and a new generation discovers the joys of an internet that’s as intimate and connected as a friendly neighborhood. And this hearkens back to that surprising, and delightful, discovery that often underpinned the internet of a generation ago — sometimes the entire platform you were using to talk to others was just being run by one, passionate person. We’re seeing the biggest return to that human-run, personal-scale web that we’ve witnessed since the turn of the millennium, with enough momentum that it’s likely that 2024 is the first year since then that many people have the experience of making a new connection or seeing something go viral on a platform that’s being run by a regular person instead of a commercial entity. It’s going to make a lot of new things possible.
I have had ideas for a different internet -- a network of networks. Since Stewart Brand and Ted Nelson and Kevin Kelly, technology was meant to empower and liberate people. Only a handful actually do, as in Wikipedia. People have enormous computing power in their computers and mobile devices. It often just liberates cash from their pockets.
Time to reinvent. I'll share ideas later.
No need for this crap: [2]
Well, things changed a little bit in tech of late. Often, the power shifts in the tech world because of a dramatic new invention that solves an old problem a whole lot better. But in the current era, when most of what's getting funded and hyped up are just various attempts to undermine workers and control consumers, we're instead seeing lots of major players lose power because their signature offerings have gotten so much worse. Search engines are becoming far more useless as they attempt to chase AI hype and shoehorn in less reliable results, even as their legitimate search results get cluttered up with AI-generated crap. The most culturally influential social network has had its cultural relevance destroyed by its billionaire man-child owner's tantrum-based managemenet style. And the major mobile phone platforms overplayed their hand so badly in exerting power over their app ecosystems that regulators around the globe have responded by prying open these heretofore-closed markets.
Time for a network of networks, not a network of 4 or 5 castles surrounded by serfs.
Big things can happen with such a virtual machine.
Even better, you could a mailman server, and get yourself a proper mailing-list of like-minded subscribers - for any subject under the sun - chatting away on a regular basis.
Fact is, all it takes to set up a decent social network is to do some social engineering. Even real, meat-space activities can be completely divulged of their toxic mainstream membership in the info-spectacle industrial complex, and replaced with a couple smart services, on a tightly bound VM, somewhere functional.
Big things happen because of the people, not the technology involved...
And are you saying this could work with a few technically-minded friends, or with anyone? It's hard to imagine it working with anyone. Not to be a negative Nancy or anything, I wish it were possible all the same.
I imagine the OP meant that you can do a lot of things with just a tiny little VM, included in a pool of larger VM's somewhere, unassuming .. just off to the side of the main budget.
>And are you saying this could work with a few technically-minded friends, or with anyone?
Once you get a phpBB/mailmain system set up, its really easy to send less technically-inclined folks towards the community - but indeed, community-run servers tend to survive longer than those led by a BDFL ..
The point is it can be done, easily enough. We don't need these walled gardens.