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The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

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Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#41

Post by InefficientRed »

na85 wrote: post #29
InefficientRed wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still run a half dozen VMs with genuinely ancient LAMP stacks and CGI code on a 5 year old desktop in my basement. People use those sites. Really the only thing that changed in last couple decades is that Docker makes admining those servers 1000x easier. The old web never went away, and the "new old web" will either fail to become popular or well become the "new new web". Eternal September is a social phenomenon an…

Who is your ISP?

Verizon FIOS residential fiber.

(I've never had an ISP that allowed hosting HTTP servers in its TOS. But I've always hosted HTTP servers, and I've never had any issues. FWIW Gemini servers are also servers.)

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#42

Post by amelius »

kstrauser wrote: post #5

I sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine . I made that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned that service from end to end and had completely…

The thing that is missing in the DIY website space is discoverability.

Fix that, and you might have a chance of competing with big corporations.

(In the old days we had "web rings", but I'm afraid that's not going to work today)

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#43

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

throwhauser wrote: post #34
kstrauser wrote: post #5

I sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine . I made that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned that service from end to end and had completely…

How can a small website cope with GDPR compliance though? The rules that sprang up to constrain the social-media behemoths seem onerous for anyone but them to comply with.

By not collecting data it has no need for, and not passing that data on to third parties? By providing an ability to delete any user account, and for editing any personal information? By not using EBCDIC to store said information?

Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be?

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#44

Post by marginalia_nu »

aluminussoma wrote: post #31

The Internet today feels like a big box strip mall in suburbia. While visiting my home town, I looked for a local, independent hardware store. There was only Home Depot and Lowe's. Then I realize how few independent businesses were left. On the Internet, you have Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Much of the good content is hidden in their secret gardens (Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly Reddit). Discover…

> Discovery needs to be reimagined. Google search directs traffic but now everyone has a SEO manager to get their site to the top. If we want to see the Internet like before, original content needs to be prioritized over content like Pinterest, without needing to do anything special.

Discoverability is a big part of why the independent web is struggling. And it's not just big tech's fault, people are really bad at linking to each other. I've been trying to raise awareness about this[1] and it has made a bit of a difference and a couple of dozen sites have taken me up on my call to action, but people are still really shy about linking to pages they like even though I'm sure nobody minds getting linked to.

Overall I feel classic search as well as community aggregation (like reddit) suffers from being too manipulable. You just can't find good content produced by humans over there anymore.

I've been experimenting with various alternative paradigms. I think there probably is a better way, but I honestly don't quite know what the answer is just yet. You've got to contend with link rot as well, which is the bane of manual curation.

[1] https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/19-website-discoverability-c...

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#45

Post by president »

aluminussoma wrote: post #31

The Internet today feels like a big box strip mall in suburbia. While visiting my home town, I looked for a local, independent hardware store. There was only Home Depot and Lowe's. Then I realize how few independent businesses were left. On the Internet, you have Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Much of the good content is hidden in their secret gardens (Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly Reddit). Discover…

A big problem today is that platforms only highlight only popular/trendy or paid content. What I would like to see are platforms that give regular people a chance either through chronological or random discovery. There is so much great content out there that doesn't make it into the limelight because of algorithm bias or because creators don't have the money/resources to boost their content.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#46

Post by kilroy123 »

aluminussoma wrote: post #31

The Internet today feels like a big box strip mall in suburbia. While visiting my home town, I looked for a local, independent hardware store. There was only Home Depot and Lowe's. Then I realize how few independent businesses were left. On the Internet, you have Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Much of the good content is hidden in their secret gardens (Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly Reddit). Discover…

Such a good way to put it. I couldn't agree more.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#47

Post by Animats »

What's pushing people back towards having their own web sites is the increasing obnoxiousness of the dominant players. It's just too much hassle to deal with Google and their semi-random censorship, Medium and their paywall, Twitter and their demands that people sign in, and Facebook looking as ad-heavy as Myspace in its declining years. It's quite cheap to bring up a basic web site, a blog, or a forum on shared hosting.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#48

Post by throwhauser »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #43
throwhauser wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can a small website cope with GDPR compliance though? The rules that sprang up to constrain the social-media behemoths seem onerous for anyone but them to comply with.

By not collecting data it has no need for, and not passing that data on to third parties? By providing an ability to delete any user account, and for editing any personal information? By not using EBCDIC to store said information? Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be?

> Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be?

I'm not sure. I guess if one trusts the default logging settings on the server software to be compliant, and only uses static HTML, maybe that's adequate? But as soon as any third-party code or data provided by some other server gets involved, it's hard to know what might be logged elsewhere as a result of visiting your site.

I mean, would an old-fashioned web visitor counter be compliant? It's tracking something in order to provide that number.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#49

Post by empressplay »

I get the nostalgia but not the sentiment. You can still set up a website, you can still post content on it, you can still link to that content on social media to get viewers, if you attach Google Analytics to your site, that traffic then improves your search rankings which brings you more traffic.

Hundreds of people a day read my rantings (and I probably owe most of them an apology for that) but the point is you can still make a 'personal' website and grow an audience even now, you don't need an 'alternative' web to do that, you just need to put in the effort.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#50

Post by stakkur »

I remember the glory days of UNIX/Usenet/etc. in the 80s at college too. I had an email address at Compuserve in the mid-80s, though I mainly used it for talking to other Compuserve members (when we weren't using 'CB channels', for those that remember). I remember all the various things like Usenet before the 'Internet' too; I don't recall anybody in my group ever calling it the Internet until after the WWW came along.
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