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The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

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71–80 of 409 posts

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#71

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…

I think there's some kind of fallacy there. Nothing's really changed, in the sense that there's nothing stopping you (or anybody else) from running your own server that serves up simplehand-written HTML, if that's what you want to do. You can probably even do it on your phone, but I wouldn't hold my breath for the app to get accepted to any official app stores. Personally, I think the UI on phones is atrocious, and w…

> Personally, I think the UI on phones is atrocious, and would never want to use one for any kind of development work, but to each their own.

When the OP said

> but I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on their phone to impress their friends

I think he meant actually running the serving of the content from the phone's hardware, not actually doing the development itself on the phone.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#72
post #42

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)

We also had curated directories, DMOZ being the most common. Starting a bunch of DMOZ-like, federating (i.e. sharing and trusting one another to provide high-quality links, semi-comprehensive directories might be the quickest and most effective way of bringing "the old Internet" back to life. This might even become an acknowledged part of the Fediverse, if it leveraged the existing Web standards wrt. structured "third-party annotation" of outside Web resources, as issued e.g. by the W3C WebAnnotation Working Group. https://www.w3.org/annotation

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#73
post #30

> 'Some people use the term "Web 3.0" to refer only to decentralized blockchain-based networks without considering that all personal websites have essentially the same goals, be they on the regular Internet or on the new blockchain networks. Those who use the term "web 3.0" seem to have forgotten that self-hosted personal websites that run on home servers and are accessible over the regular Internet are inherently de…

It's worth noting that there is a core of people doing real work in crypto who are not trying to peddle NFTs or other sleight of hand rungpulls designed to separate the gullible from their money. Ethereum, for example, is full of people building interesting things like off-chain low-cost trading using non-interactive zero knowledge proofs and actively working to make crypto less energy intensive and more useful. They…

So long as fraud and theft remain crimes, then Governments will still exert control over currency; fiat or not.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#74
post #30

> 'Some people use the term "Web 3.0" to refer only to decentralized blockchain-based networks without considering that all personal websites have essentially the same goals, be they on the regular Internet or on the new blockchain networks. Those who use the term "web 3.0" seem to have forgotten that self-hosted personal websites that run on home servers and are accessible over the regular Internet are inherently de…

I got bored the other day and thought it would be funny to make a copy of the most expensive NFT and set that as my Twitter profile picture because they added that silly feature. So I downloaded MetaMask, got everything set up, and went to one of the NFT marketplaces to try to make one. Uploaded the image and got a big scary warning: > (paraphrased; I don't have a screenshot) This image was found too many times on th…

This is Moxie's point. Web 1.0 is actually decentralized and permissionless. You can actually host that image on your own Web 1.0 without any gatekeepers being involved.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#75
post #30

> 'Some people use the term "Web 3.0" to refer only to decentralized blockchain-based networks without considering that all personal websites have essentially the same goals, be they on the regular Internet or on the new blockchain networks. Those who use the term "web 3.0" seem to have forgotten that self-hosted personal websites that run on home servers and are accessible over the regular Internet are inherently de…

The thing that is telling to me about all of these "revolutions" is WHO is doing the hype and to what end.

Web 1.0 it was the nerds saying it was going to change the world and the people with no knowledge of how the internet worked saying it was BS.

Web 2.0 for the most part just seemed to naturally happen without a ton of specific hype and was what finally got all the naysayers of Web 1.0 on board.

Web 3.0 is all the OG naysayers saying it is going to change the world while the nerds roll their eyes.

Personally I am looking forward to Web 3.1 :-D

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#76

I don't think the old internet ever went away, instead the commercial internet exploded, in some ways good in some ways bad. If you want to create and showcase your own stuff you have a ton more options than you used to, it could be nostalgic HTML pages with blinking colors or some slick thing on a prefab site builder, up to you.

In general I've begun to think of the whole small internet movement as a countrerculture phenomenon. It's got a lot of touching stones with the bohemians, the beats, the hippies, etc. What they've all got in common is a search for independence, authenticity and community.

I do think the retro-aesthetic is more of a statement than anything else. It's like the long hair of a hippie. Like there's no reason a hippie couldn't have a crew cut and think like a hippie and live like a hippie. Yet almost none of them did. For the same reason almost no small website has a bootstrap template.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#77

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 li…

Yeah a lot of the aggregating effects start from search engines, which is why SEO rankings are such a big deal.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#79
post #30

> 'Some people use the term "Web 3.0" to refer only to decentralized blockchain-based networks without considering that all personal websites have essentially the same goals, be they on the regular Internet or on the new blockchain networks. Those who use the term "web 3.0" seem to have forgotten that self-hosted personal websites that run on home servers and are accessible over the regular Internet are inherently de…

I got bored the other day and thought it would be funny to make a copy of the most expensive NFT and set that as my Twitter profile picture because they added that silly feature. So I downloaded MetaMask, got everything set up, and went to one of the NFT marketplaces to try to make one. Uploaded the image and got a big scary warning: > (paraphrased; I don't have a screenshot) This image was found too many times on th…

> Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much easier than creating a user/pass for every site- just click Sign and go. That's basically the only good UX of web3 as it stands.

We already have this with SSO though - what would be the difference? Decentralization? Though it should be possible to host your own SSO.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that there is a core of people doing real work in crypto who are not trying to peddle NFTs or other sleight of hand rungpulls designed to separate the gullible from their money. Ethereum, for example, is full of people building interesting things like off-chain low-cost trading using non-interactive zero knowledge proofs and actively working to make crypto less energy intensive and more useful. They…

Yes there are people with 100% good intentions working in this space. There were also people with 100% good intentions working at Theranos.

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