Comment by vconnor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vconnor | Hacker News Reader

My thoughts lately have been bouncing between "they've finally killed the internet" and "there's no way to create an island for humans online anymore, is there?" and I figured this is a good place as any to see if anybody else has been exploring this question.

In an ever-larger Internet with ever-growing bullshit and regurgitated, useless data, social-media-driven madness, commercial interests, the odds of finding islands of naive and purely human interaction shrink by the day. Given the advances of AI, the hope of having a network of "unadulterated" users, however small, are practically nil. Add the fact that most of human affairs are now online - work, leisure, communication, paying taxes, shopping, etc. - there is not even a realistic hope of living without the net.

What are we to do? Do we only have the choice to assimilate the AI-driven, algorithmic future or to become complete Luddites living on subsistence farming? Are (open) islands of humans communicating over the internet possible? Can we connect three computers with the full guarantee they are all being operated by homo sapiens? Will "real-life, face-to-face interaction" become the new frontier for outcasts, weirdos and idealists, just like the internet was 30 years ago?

This is a serious question and request for comments. I do not particularly care to start a discussion on whether AI is good, the internet is fine and I'm being dramatic; there are plenty of other places to discuss AI optimism.

[My favourite tree is the birch. Majestic with its white bark, reminds me of cooler climates. Also pines, with the peculiar smell and the reddish, thick carpet of needles they leave on the forest floor.]

AI is going to get more interesting. Right now you get vanilla chats and weird, generated images. Eventually AI will have the wealth of all knowledge and a personality.

Is that frightening? Maybe. But it is considerably more cerebral than the infinite scroll/influencer status quo. And there will always be personal interaction and voice/video with realness attestation.

Also, imho we don't want islands of real people since we've seen the islands turn into facebook and tiktok. We need networks of real people interleaved with whatever the rest of the net decides it wants to be.

> My thoughts lately have been bouncing between "they've finally killed the internet" and "there's no way to create an island for humans online anymore, is there?"

https://wiby.me

And if the humans are willing to link the connections:

https://avocado.outerweb.org/

An additional concern: Even if you can require proof of humanity to enter an online space, how can you know that the human isn't communing with an AI and reposting whatever it says to?

I agree that there's no way to guarantee that you're interacting with a human online.

Optimistically, this could spark a return to the internet/real-world relationship that the author mentioned: "Back then, the internet felt like an addition to our in-person connecting..."

Rather than meeting people online, you meet them in real life and have the option to talk to them over the internet. Just like you trusted that they didn't hand off their account to another person before AI, you'll have to trust that it's them that you're talking to.

The biggest threat to that scenario is suburbanization and the lack of third spaces. How will you meet new people if there's nowhere to just exist? This was already happening to kids, and the pandemic really accelerated it.

Long story short, I think there's a possibility between assimilation and rebellion, but it's not in the suburbs. We need to work for it now, and fast, because the next generation won't have the frame of reference to do it themselves.

There was an old blog post that talked about "hot tub communities" ... legend says there was a backyard with a hot tub with a passcode lock. The owner didn't mind people using it until the A-holes showed up and then he'd change the passcode on the lock again.

There's more to the story (of course) than this half-remembered paragraph, but I've thought through if there was a way to reproduce that.

Nowadays, there were two schisms. One was between Facebook and YouTube... FB being content walled and protected by default, where YouTube (and old blogs and StackOverflow, Reddit, etc) were public by default.

I hate feeding Facebook, but now, "speaking in public", you're "just feeding the bots". Your content is vaporized into the aether the instant you make it public.

I've thought through if there were a way to make more private, semi-distributed communities, but you run smack into the difficulty of one "traitor" that rebroadcasts content (or any rebroadcasting at all) ends up ruining the closed system.

Time to change the lock on the hot tub again, and delete all the recordings from the cameras. :-/

> o we only have the choice to assimilate the AI-driven, algorithmic future or to become complete Luddites living on subsistence farming?

A few days ago someone posted an article linking luddites to the NASA moon landing program to AI-generated furry porn.

The interesting gist is that Luddites were misrepresented then and continue to be misrepresented today. The Luddite movement isn't conservative nor regressive, it is human!

> The Luddite movement isn't conservative

No? To be conservative is to be hesitant of change. I know you say the Luddites have been misrepresented, but if they don't represented at least that much... What do they represent?

> it is human!

These aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, I expect every human is conservative sometimes.

The Luddites were not opposed to technology and change. The movement opposed the owning/ruling class's ability to buy and consolidate more labor as technology improved. The Luddite movement would have embraced technology if it benefited labor. It was a workers rights movement.

> The Luddites were not opposed to technology and change.

Conservatives aren't opposed to change, they are only hesitant of it. They worry about what negative effects the change might bring. Like, say, "the owning/ruling class's ability to buy and consolidate more labor as technology improved."

I guess the Luddite movement is conservative after all. Not sure what was up with the earlier comment trying to paint some other kind of picture.

> I guess the Luddite movement is conservative after all.

Sure, +10 points for semantics, but it's missing the point. Maybe my fault for invoking a false liberal/conservative binary.

Intriguing to try and reify labor rights as conservative. Definitely a novel argument.

> but it's missing the point.

There was a point to that? Hopefully the Luddites being a labor movement wasn't the point, because I've never heard of it as anything else. It would be pointless to reiterate the obvious.

> Intriguing to try and reify labor rights as conservative.

The people were conservative[1]. Labor rights aren't human and cannot exhibit human attributes.

[1] And also liberal. The difference is only a matter of perspective. As you point out, it is false to think of them as being somehow different. No doubt everyone is both liberal and conservative at the same time, all the time. We use the words merely to indicate at which angle we happen to be looking at someone.

> because I've never heard of it as anything else.

Then it's clear your didn't read my comments. Scroll up and you can see that I am replying to a mischaracterization of Luddites.

Here is the original comment that I addressed:

> or to become complete Luddites living on subsistence farming?

> Then it's clear your didn't read my comments.

Whether or not I did is irrelevant. I replied to a specific bit of your comment that wasn't related to the rest of the conversation. If you didn't want to discuss that tangent, why did you bring it up?

> Here is the original comment that I addressed

Again, that has nothing to do with our conversation. Perhaps it is you who didn't read (meaning here to understand; I know you took in the individual words) my comment?

> A few days ago someone posted an article linking luddites to the NASA moon landing program to AI-generated furry porn.

Have a link?

https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/rolling-ladder-behind-us/

I found it to be a very fun read. Some neat connections being made.

> Are (open) islands of humans communicating over the internet possible?

If there is a desirable quality about open islands of humans, sure. Of course. Whatever that desirable quality is will allow recognizing what and what isn't human.

But I suspect there isn't a desirable quality to be found there. In fact, before the "Facebook age" came along, the idea of humans on the internet was more or less considered to be a scourge. HN itself is a product of that era, removing all semblance of whatever humanity there might be hidden in the implementation details. The Internet was seemingly born to be a completely different world, void of humans, only software.

I've often thought that what we need is a social network. You only see your friends, and your friends' friends, and so on. With tools for blocking branches of the graph and restricting views to those friends. All controlled by signed content. A blockchain without the "chain" bit, I guess.

The devil is in the details, of course. Is it even possible to thread the needle of usability and controlling your own data/algorithm? Maybe! But if there's going to be a human island, I think this is the way. Individual trusted connections branching out from you.

Bluesky does most of this. One big miss is the lack of private accounts though.

And the "block" in "blockchain" is a different sense of the word from how you block users on social media, so I don't think it bears any resemblance to blockchain. It sounds more like email (or another similarly federated network) with a whitelist.

What I mean is it would involve cryptographic signing to keep your data in "your network". Your friends can always download and share an image you've posted, of course, but it wouldn't be just stored out in the open somewhere. Content you post could only be unlocked by a key from your network. Threaded discussion could be limited to just a set of friends you choose, and their friends, by limiting the keys you distribute as part of the first post.

So blockchain has some similarities in that it allows a decentralized way of managing communication through cryptographic signing, but the core of blockchain is that it provides a full "chain" of transactions going back to the beginning of time, whereas this idea is less "chainy" and more of a graph, or maybe a bunch of little chains, each originating from your profile

> I figured this is a good place as any to see if anybody else has been exploring this question

Sure, tons of articles about similar efforts if you search for the term 'small web'. In particular, I like gemini and tildes (tilde.town, tilde.team, tilde.club, etc) which are actually pretty neat if you take the time to ssh in and checkout the ecosystems they've built. The tildes in particular might surprise you, gemini can be a bit of a ghost town if you don't know where to look though.

Tildes technically aren't public since you have to login to them, but they're not that different from social media in that respect (and since membership usually involves messaging the server owner personally, it's hard to imagine bot activity getting too bad). Gemini is public but you have to use a (usually terminal-based) browser program in order to interact with it and usually self-host a gemlog if you want a 'website' on it.

These communities make me happy because you tend to find people who use xmpp or IRC or alternative platforms there and kinda get away from the enshittification loop. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea, and I'm sure since this is HN I'm going to get some very snarky responses for mentioning these things as alternatives, but my experiences with exploring the communities around these technologies have consistently made me smile, which is downright weird in the current year. It's got me considering checking out usenet, which I'm too young to have used before outside of direct downloads.

In retrospect, it's funny because all of the things I mentioned are technically 'not the internet', which might honestly be your answer.

Thank you for the pointers, I will check those out. Though whatever the protocol it’s only a matter of time before these places get infested as well by bots, bad actors or bad behaviour in general.

technically not the web*

Reply on news.ycombinator.com