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We need to rewild the internet

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Re: We need to rewild the internet

#71

Post by rhdunn »

krapp wrote: post #29
gspencley wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we find shit now? I swear search engines are getting borderline useless. And it's not necessarily their fault, it's just very difficult to find search results these days that aren't lists of affiliate links. And in fairness, this is probably less to do with SEO'ers "gaming" the system and more to do with the fact that all of the content we actually cared about just disappeared behind walled gardens. I abandoned G…

I find shit all the time. Google still works fine for me. I don't know what people on Hacker News are doing that they can never seem to find a single useful result on any search engine, ever.

Searching e.g. "xq31 curlyarrayconstructor does not use enclosedexpr":

1. In google, I get 9 results, none of which are a reference to the W3C XQuery/XPath issue. This is because google is actually "helpfully" searching for "xq31 curly array constructor does not use enclosed expr" -- telling it to not do that finds the issue, returning two results.

2. In bing, the bug report (bug 29989) is the top result.

3. In DuckDuckGo, it is also the top result.

I've had other problems searching google for specific error messages as it decides to remove quoting, tends to show results for space-separated compound identifiers (see the "curly array constructor" in what google searches for by default), does word stemming, and other "helpful" transformations on the search.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#72

Post by criddell »

jstanley wrote: post #67
criddell wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought about building personal site, but the opportunity cost is just too high. The time I spend making a site has to come from somewhere and there just isn't anything I do that I want to take time from.

Don't take it from the time you spend doing something you care about. Take it from the time you spend doing nothing.

The time I have set aside for me to do nothing is my most valuable time! I'd rather take it from just about anything else

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#73

Post by cyanydeez »

notaustinpowers wrote: post #8
urda wrote: post #2

More people should be tending their "digital gardens" just to have something to curate and share. Bring back the weird, the odd, the deep-dives into topics you never imagined having such detail, bring back the strange animated GIFS, the websites always "under construction", give me your weird, give me your odd, this should be everyone's place to be free.

I was just thinking today that I should just start posting my stuff on a personal site. Photos, blogs, life updates, etc. It gives me that control that I want, and I don't have to worry about Meta, etc trying to monetize it. Plus I get to unplug from those "n liked your post" dopamine hits.

Yes, but does it give you the validation you deserve as a member of society?

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#75

Post by dangrossman »

chadsix wrote: post #40

Self hosting is definitely the way toward rewilding the internet. If everyone ran their own blogs, chats, email, etc. and let their systems federate thru protocol rather than on a single platform, the forests will thrive again.

Self-hosting means taking a second job as a sysadmin, applying software updates all the time, patching emergency security vulnerabilities, hardening services against constant attacks, deciding whether the daily "I have found a bug in your system and will disclose" mails are legitimate threats. If you fail at any of these tasks, relatively new regulations mean various governments can fine you more than your net worth over failing to report a data breach to the right agency on the right timeline. To me, that's what prevents people from standing up their own blogs and other services on a home-brew server in their house or a $5 VPS these days.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#76

Post by marginalia_nu »

Timwi wrote: post #69
marginalia_nu wrote: post #38

There's plenty of great fascinating wild Internet out there. The problem is finding it, since it typically struggles to be heard in a sea of well funded SEO-optimized garbage. It's a discovery problem, above all.

I agree with you, although I wonder how we found the great fascinating wild websites before search engines even existed. I remember “web rings” but I don't think that's the whole story.

We've more or less always had search engines as long as there has been a public Internet. But web directories were a thing early on too.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#77

Post by properbrew »

urda wrote: post #2

More people should be tending their "digital gardens" just to have something to curate and share. Bring back the weird, the odd, the deep-dives into topics you never imagined having such detail, bring back the strange animated GIFS, the websites always "under construction", give me your weird, give me your odd, this should be everyone's place to be free.

If you haven't checked out the "Surpise me" button on https://wiby.me I strongly suggest you do. These digital gardens are still out there even if sadly stuck in time.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#78

Post by johnny22 »

ipaddr wrote: post #52
johnny22 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the technical capability to host, but I don't want the responsibility or want to spend the time. I don't wanna be interrupted from my actual work or hobbies to fix up my personal hosted stuff. I just want to let someone or some group handle that for me.

Get shared hosting.

I still have to manage the service or the code. I don't wanna worry about software updates.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#79

Post by SamBam »

efields wrote: post #56

I'm pessimistic about the likelihood of any new "wild" internet ecologies thriving the way they did in the past. If you think of hypertext as a medium, it's been pushed to its most logical extreme already. There's not a lot of boundaries to explore. There are weird places online already, sure. And curiosities still abound. But idk… I wonder if a generation lost in cyberspace is exactly the reason why we are actually…

> If you think of hypertext as a medium, it's been pushed to its most logical extreme already.

I think this is an odd framing. It's not about pushing things to further extremes, it's about using all these mediums that have been allowed to wither and die. It's about getting out of the sterile high-walled gardens.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#80

Post by johnny22 »

ranger_danger wrote: post #49
chadsix wrote: post #40

Self hosting is definitely the way toward rewilding the internet. If everyone ran their own blogs, chats, email, etc. and let their systems federate thru protocol rather than on a single platform, the forests will thrive again.

> federate But I think the problem quickly turns to over-fragmentation, even with something like matrix, mastodon or lemmy today, there are so many different instances and many of them are blocking several other instances from federating with them, people don't know where to go and have too many different places to look for stuff that they simply won't even try.

I still don't have a matrix account anywhere because of that. Let alone the others. I want my own identity, but I don't wanna host a whole server. It'd be cool if fastmail offered such a service
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