What I want from the internet
chrbutler.com
What I want from the internet
1–10 of 114 posts
Re: What I want from the internet
#2[flagged]
Re: What I want from the internet
#3> And the internet used to be more work to experience. Today, it’s more work to avoid.
Since the author likes analogies, I'll add mine: the internet now has become roads, bridges, towns. The internet used to be forests, rivers to ford, camps.
There used to be an exploration-aspect to the internet, not sure what you would find if you took this trail or that one. Now we all seem to travel the few, well-worn roads to the same handful of destinations.
I do like the internet-as-reference-book internet where I can quickly solve a programming problem that is stymieing me. I would keep Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Stack Overflow.
Outside that though I do prefer roads less taken.
Re: What I want from the internet
#4Thanks for sharing! Having the same feeling for a while now.
Re: What I want from the internet
#5> And the internet used to be more work to experience. Today, it’s more work to avoid. Since the author likes analogies, I'll add mine: the internet now has become roads, bridges, towns. The internet used to be forests, rivers to ford, camps. There used to be an exploration-aspect to the internet, not sure what you would find if you took this trail or that one. Now we all seem to travel the few, well-worn roads to th…
I like that analogy!
Re: What I want from the internet
#6[flagged]
That's fair! Would love to hear (sincerely) how you would answer this question.
Re: What I want from the internet
#7I'm pretty darn sure I'm not the only independent content creator being largely ignored, attacked for "self promotion" if they post their own work while no one else ever posts it etc and then listening to people whine about the internet and how they wish this, that or the other while you roll your eyes and think to yourself again "This is the internet you helped create. If you don't like it, make other choices."
Re: What I want from the internet
#8I'm pretty darn sure I'm not the only independent content creator being largely ignored, attacked for "self promotion" if they post their own work while no one else ever posts it etc and then listening to people whine about the internet and how they wish this, that or the other while you roll your eyes and think to yourself again "This is the internet you helped create. If you don't like it, make other choices."
Exactly! Not sure if you made it to the end, but that's essentially the parting message.
Re: What I want from the internet
#9[flagged]
What does his race have to do with it?
Re: What I want from the internet
#10Hi Christopher, I really liked this article.
> It is hard, though, to build and maintain the structures of the old, “smaller” internet.
I agree. Even just setting up an RSS reader and finding a little community of blogs to follow can take a lot of work. Interact with those blogs, whether that's by submitting comments to individual posts, posting responses on your own blog, or doing something fancier with IndieWeb protocols [0], takes time and know-how. Hacker News, subreddits, etc. can remove some of that friction, at the cost of less personalization and more spam.
There are so so many cool ideas in the small internet. Project Gemini [1] comes to mind, as do linkrolls and the Marginalia search engine [2]. There have been a lot of folks finding meaningful communities in the fediverse recently too. I think the small internet both benefits and suffers from this fractal of different tools and communities: among so much diversity, it's simultaneously difficult and rewarding to find your place. I hope that over time, we'll be able to reduce the difficulty and increase the reward by building better tools for discovering and participating in these communities.
Anyways, even if we're hard to find sometimes, there are a lot of us who feel at-home reading our RSS readers, posting to a blog from time-to-time, and maybe even making new tools to make these activities easier. I feel certain that over time, we'll be better connected in ways that make us happy.