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The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

cheapskatesguide.org

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Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#101

Post by masswerk »

I think, something which is missed, is what I'd call the "mediametic horizon". In the "old days", people weren't just "doing their thing", there was more to it. Even, if you entertained just a small site, you were somewhat playing big media (compare the vintage radio allusions or the ubiquitous news signations that popped up about 1997.) Small websites were pulling for reach, dreaming of a mention on "What's cool" lists. (Besides other functions, HN may be the last true what's-cool list today.) Even those building professional sites were driven by this "mediametic horizon": you wouldn't build the same website twice, not even the same concept. Adding to and enriching what was the known standard, the known functionality, the known capabilities of the Web was the raison d'être of any new site. Becoming known and mentioned for such a feat was a major incentive, both for the designer-developers and for the clients (again, for reach and prestige). The truth being, the "old web" essentially required and depended on brokers of reach and prestige to develop this drive, and I do not see any candidates for fulfilling this function. (Apart from HN, that is.)

P.S./Edit: This was still true for the early 2000s: back then, I was involved in a major relaunch of the site of a telephone carrier and the clients were scanning relevant Usenet groups for critiques in order to evaluate their success. (Surely, this wasn't the norm, but it still did happen.)

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#102

Post by ravenstine »

pratnala wrote: post #7
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…

Yeah no, I wish we don't go back to that. It doesn't scale at all.

LOL If anything, a more barebones internet scales better. The less data you're sending, the more connections you can handle simultaneously, and the less code you'll need. When communication is more decentralized, there's not much of a need for most sites to need to think that much about scaling. We don't need the next Facebook or the next Reddit. I'd love to go back to more independent forums. Maybe with something better than vBulletin, at least.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#103

Post by technothrasher »

stakkur wrote: post #50

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 alon…

> I don't recall anybody in my group ever calling it the Internet until after the WWW came along.

Really? I do. I spent the early years of the web trying to get all the new people who had suddenly joined the net to understand that the web and the internet were two very different things. I gave up after a while.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#104

Post by tata71 »

pavlov wrote: 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…

> spends more power than the entire country of Finland. The only purpose of these activities is to speculate on prices of these make-believe digital assets

This'll get almost as much traction as activists decrying HTTPS/SSL because it took more compute, and therefore obviously more pollution!

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#105

Post by tata71 »

gitfan86 wrote: post #69
idiotsecant wrote: post #61

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.

With the obvious exception that...it's impossible to fork an entity like Theranos when they become sufficiently evil such that the community no longer believes in their direction.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#106

Post by largely_sitting »

jabbany wrote: post #32

I feel like this article doesn't address the reason why people moved away from the "old" Internet --- most people only care about their _content_ not the particular technology that backs it. In the old times, you could only host content if you were really good with the technology. The people who had websites were people who knew how to set up and run a web server, and to compose the HTML content that was being served…

Its the data centers that are going to be responsible for end of web2, when they figure out they can undercut web2 and offer a continuous federated open data storage system and virtual machine. Advertisers will pay them for access directly. Google, Meta, would just be third party indexing services.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#107

Post by tata71 »

bsamuels wrote: post #99
sprkwd wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> off-chain low-cost trading using non-interactive zero knowledge proofs As a layman, I’m not touching crypto until I know what this means.

Seems a little silly since one wouldn't expect most laymen to understand how TLS works, but enjoy: https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/05/zksnarks-in-a-nutshell/

https://www.reddit.com/r/loopringorg/comments/qz3bj5/zk_proo...

Yes, it's too complicated right now (so was https://www.!).

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#108

Post by kstrauser »

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.

As a practical matter, GDPR doesn't apply to personal sites outside of EU. They're not going to go after some personal site in Iowa, and if they did, so what? After the massive PR debacle that would ensue, the EU regulators wouldn't actually be able to do anything about it.

The CCPA doesn't apply to personal, not-for-profit sites.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#109

Post by coldtea »

pratnala wrote: post #7
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…

Yeah no, I wish we don't go back to that. It doesn't scale at all.

Who the fuck cares if it scales? It's better if it doesn't scale. Scale is what brought us Facebook and monopolies like Google.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#110

Post by [deleted] »

pavlov wrote: 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…

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