81–90 of 273 posts
I really agree. so often simplification alone is not enough. it should be a guiding principle, but not ignorant of the necessary complexity
Earlier quoted context omitted.
friend of mine told me this exactly : going on telegram feels like being back to the original internet. But that's probably because of all the illegal/uncensored content you can find there
ever go to onion sites? They're pretty great. No javascript, social media share buttons, ad-tech or click-jacking or videos popping up or walls in front of the content. No liking or subscribing or logging in with your facebook account... it's ironic how tor is the clean internet.
It is surprisingly easy to set up a phpBB forum or some such thing, on a tiny VM tucked into some obscure pool, set up a nameserver for it, invite a couple of your friends, and start your own community, completely disengaged from any major corporate shenanigans. Big things can happen with such a virtual machine. Even better, you could a mailman server, and get yourself a proper mailing-list of like-minded subscribers…
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.
That stuff is still around, it's just on Discord and VRChat now.
There's lots of these projects already, such as https://neocities.org/browse And even people with weird myspace style social networking sites like https://spacehey.com/browse Then there's telegram and discord, full of all kinds of strange stuff. They're just not mainstream. Probably better that way.
Not to disparage spaces like NeoCities, but to quote the great American singer/songwriter David Berman: Punk rock died when the first kid said "Punk's not dead, punk's not dead" That is - these spaces will never quite be the same as what we once had, because they're fundamentally nostalgic. The "wild" internet was also once the vanguard, the future, and that excitement won't be recaptured by going back.
I think these have inspirational historical bases as opposed to being renfairs.
They are in the hands of a younger generation.
Furthermore, because no browser is totally secure, users are going to avoid non-popular links, perpetuating the walled gardens they already use.
I fear our monoculture of operating systems has to be addressed first, before any of the rest can really take hold.
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…
True, in the literal sense that you will have to administrate your own system, but I'm sure there must be ways to make this easier for people. Perhaps small computers that come pre-configured with the correct specifications for being a good small-scale server and pre-installed with software that provides a simple web GUI dashboard that you can just drop files on and it will serve them up for you, with everything else taken care of under the hood.
> applying software updates all the time
With image based distros, containers, and their respective auto-updating schemes, this — and the concomitant problems updates may bring given the extensive and hairy state of most systems — should hopefully become a thing of the past.
> patching emergency security vulnerabilities
I mean, unless you are running something that is incredibly visible online and linked to you from a lot of places or used by a lot of people and so you need to take extreme extra security steps, shouldn't this be taken care of by just regularly updating your software? For a small scale self-hosted blog or personal email server this seems a hardly proportional.
> hardening services against constant attacks
Again, it seems like you are projecting the requirements of a much larger scale endeavor onto small-scale personal self hosting of a blog or email server only you use. And to the degree that system hardening is necessary for a small cell posted system, once again image-based operating systems with hardened Pam authentication rules that run everything in rootless podman containers and keep SELinux enabled should be more than hard enough and all that can be configured and set up upstream to the user.
> deciding whether the daily "I have found a bug in your system and will disclose" mails are legitimate threats
What are you even talking about here? For the third time, it seems like you are projecting the requirements of a much larger scale thing onto small-scale personal self hosting.
> 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
A data breach? On a small self-hosted blog or email server? Who's data would those regulations be punishing you for leaking, your own, maybe two freinds'? And those regulations, if you are speaking about the ones in the EU that I am thinking of, have pretty clear cut offs and requirements and stuff that really wouldn't apply to someone's little self-hosted thing.