How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past? This has been on my mind for a while. The layer of trash some companies have built over the internet has been ruinous.
In order to actually have and maintain a healthy balance of life and technology, such compromises are required.
So hardly anyone considered facebook to be a part of "the web". It was its own weird duck. Twenty years later and most people only frequent this "weird" part of the internet - this limited ensemble of paid and unpaid walled gardens.
yes, they were, in the UK at least. speaking as a compuserve user.
Personally I never used cix but one of the magazines (pc pro?) has columnists on it at least.
I propose building a new stack, without ICANN and friends (Verisign is raising .com prices yet again). I'm planning to build it[1] at some point, just working on other foundational stuff at the moment.
Cozy corners, webrings, and Gemini/Gopher is where I see the spirit of the old web alive and well.
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[1]: https://dap.sh
We need to be on the offensive, not on the defensive. We need to pro-actively scrape walled gardens and re-publish them without fluff.
We need to consider .onion to be the default domain for our websites.
And we should also not be ashamed of using AI to achieve our goals.
We need to implement modern conveniences in our programs.
We need to be writing bridges between walled gardens and deltachat.