[flagged]
We need to rewild the internet
171–180 of 273 posts
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#172While I don't disagree with the general sentiment the old Internet (late 90s to first half of the 00s) was very different topologically from the Internet of today.
Colleges especially were lousy with IP addresses. They'd assign a routable IP to every computer on their campus, including the ResNets. They also handed out shared disk space on servers because that was new and novel. If you knew the right people you could even get a vanity subdomain on the school's domain.
A significant amount of "wild" Internet content was found on those servers that lived on college campuses. Another significant source of "wild" content was ISP-provided web space. Most ISPs offered a few tens of megabytes of web hosting easily accessed via FTP. A lot of HTML authoring software of the era could publish directly to an FTP account. While the likes of GeoCities and AngelFire get a lot of the nostalgia today, they were far from the only source of garish web pages filled with questionable content.
In the early 00s colleges stopped giving out routable IPs to everything with a NIC and started cracking down on closet servers and web space. Besides the network security angle the MPAA and RIAA were on a tear suing colleges for "hosting" pirated content. ISPs also dropped their shared hosting around the same time. By 2010 all the major free web hosting services had shut down or enshittified to uselessness.
Without those places a lot of "wild" content just died out. People did move to hosted blogs like LiveJournal, Wordpress, or Tumblr but even those weren't the same type of "wild" sites that came before. The "wild" content has been further hurt by Google's algorithms' insistence that only content published in the past ten seconds is worthwhile and even then its only worthwhile if its SEOed to death and has Google Ads running on it.
For the most part people just moved to social media. There's zero need for administration, bandwidth is a non-issue, and publishing is pushing "Post". The downside is its social media and discoverability or even availability outside the platform is challenging or non-existent.
For non-technical people it's extremely difficult to set up a "wild" site on the Internet anymore. Even for the technically inclined it's a thankless pain in the ass to administer and keep up. If you do set something up it becomes a constant battle against spammers and script kiddies. Even just something going viral can get your account suspended or rack up huge egress fees on a cloud provider.
I love the idea of re-wilding the Internet we shouldn't pretend the Internet of today is the same as the Internet of the last century.
Edit: I a word.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
This is purely my personal philosophy but I view that, ultimately, my validation is when I'm happy with my actions, position in life, and personal accomplishments.
I love sharing those with friends and family. But I hate the opaque algorithms on social media sites that are tuned to prioritize engagement & time spent on the service. I find that these algos are rewarding rage bait due to their engagement farming.
Sharing with those that I want to share with, in an environment free of algorithms and capitalistic intentions provides that validation. And having a random site visitor here and there who enjoys what I have to say is just icing on the cake.
As I get older, I realize that we were never meant to have 10,000 people looking at what we ate for lunch, or the mess our cat made while we were at work. Interactions like that back in the 1500s would have made us more influential than Kings. A close-knit community that cherishes the expression of all our oddities, curiosities, and hobbies is something that just can't be replicated in current social media.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#174The geocities times weren’t THAT cool. We mostly had to go through pages and pages of crap stuff, cause we couldn’t find shit.
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…
> Can we find shit now?
Absolutely.
Like with anything else, you literally get what you pay for. Free search services like Google and DuckDuckgo indeed suck. I pay for Kagi, and have a wonderful search experience. I seldom have trouble finding anything. Once in a while I use someone else's computer and have to use Google. What a jarring, unpleasant experience.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#175I am running my personal web crawler since September of 2022. I gather internet domains and assign them meta information. There are various sources of my data. I assign "personal" tag to any personal website. I assign "self-host" tag to any self-host program I find. I have less than 3k of personal websites. Data are in the repository. https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database I still rely on google for man…
This site alone has links to 6k personal sites - https://aboutideasnow.com/
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#176[flagged]
> We cannot tell all people below certain IQ to just stop using the internet
What, why not? It couldn't be that hard to trick them.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
While all of what you said is technically true, you left out the fact that Tor sites are majority about illegal activity, such as hiring assassins, ordering forged identity documents, and buying and selling controlled substances. I'm afraid that kind of kills the nostalgia for me.
Half the fun is trying to guess which 40% of those are just larping, which 40% are feds, and which 20% are actually real.
The Internet, where the women are men, the men are boys, and the boys are FBI agents.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#178More 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.
I would encourage it. A few years ago, I started a site/blog on both Web and Gemini. I mostly keep track of projects I build, books I read, some interesting events, and some cheatsheets and links I revisit a lot. Writing things down definitely keeps me more motivated, and it is nice to look back in time and reflect occasionally.
And I made the site simple and contrary to current Web on purpose: plain HTML, no JS, no popups, only graphics are photos and diagrams.
Re: We need to rewild the internet
#179Re: We need to rewild the internet
#180There'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.
The reinforcement learning algorithm of facebook, instagram, youtube, tik-tok needs to move at the edge for that to happen. Nowadays, this seems much more probable than any other time in history, i.e last 15 years.
Personal recommendation algorithms using RL, are certainly possible, because RL is the least computationally intensive training, compared to supervised, unsupervised etc. They also require some kind of social structure, but that will be setup on a blockchain, in an totally open and transparent way, yet private.