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We need to rewild the internet

noemamag.com

181–190 of 273 posts

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#181
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.

You know what, I'm gonna go find an "under construction" animated gif to add to my website now. Thank you.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#182
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.

I just made a personal site (darigo.su), it's buggy as hell but fun to just make whatever I want. Do any of you have a quirky personal site?

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#183

Earlier 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.

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.

That's perfectly fair. In my own case, blogging has changed how I conduct my hobbies, for the better. They say you don't understand something until you have to explain it to someone else. It has made my projects more robust, and often simpler, and the process has helped me uncover mistakes. I'm not sure that it has actually come with a cost. The mechanics are trivial thanks to GitHub and of course Git.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've used that button so many times to find things. I wish there was another directory that had the same unique feel but a bit more modernized. Wiby seems to be only one era or feel.

The guy behind StumbleUpon still seems to be doing things in that area.

I'm not sure what went wrong with StumbleUpon; it worked well from the user end of things.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#185
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.

Wow!! Thank you so much. I had no idea this existed and it’s so fun.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they remember the past far more fondly than it was and converge the utility they get from the current day with the ideals of back then. The reality is there is far more creative and well produced content on the web and closed platforms today than there ever was in any other point in time. And if you can't find it fast enough, AI can generate direct, customized answers.

It is objectively worse than it used to be because it tries to be too "smart" by rewriting queries in a way that genericizes them. Instead of getting 10 search results that are actually relevant to the question being asked, you get "10,000,000" results that are only vaguely related. I suspect the reason for this is that more search results -> more pages the user will likely click through just to make sure they are lo…

Google says it finds millions of hits but only lets you scroll though a few hundred. The rest they don't want to show you.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#188

There aren't any operating systems capable of withstanding the internet for a year without updates and/or active management. Until this becomes possible, and widespread, the idea of self-hosting is going to remain niche. 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…

> There aren't any operating systems capable of withstanding the internet for a year without updates and/or active management.

I regularly update my personal systems, but when I ran FreeBSD for work, we only did kernel and OS updates for important things. Most of our machines would turn on, build and install our latest tested and patched version and reboot, and that would be the last time it rebooted until it was time to recycle it 3-5 years later.

Yeah, I looked at every update, and most of them weren't important enough to upgrade existing working machines; I guess that's active management: I did consider and most often choose to take no action, but it's still not many actions taken. That's not to say FreeBSD is perfect; it's not, there were certainly some updates that needed to go to all machines right quick. Some of the applications we ran on the other hand... It was a great day when we replaced Wordpress, because I was no longer on the hook to spend a day updating that with no notice. I would be ok leaving my current hosting for a year and confident it will be fine when I get back; other than it a disk encryption passphrase to boot after a power incident.

Mostly Linux with minimal software that's mostly finished is fine too; although I won't run it personally anymore, except in OpenWRT and other embedded systems where I don't have much choice.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#189
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 have been doing so for a long time, but man, hosting costs are rising, and they really don't give me much storage to host community functionality at all. :|

http://www.ruffandtuffrecordings.com/

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#190
post #152
post #11

The geocities times weren’t THAT cool. We mostly had to go through pages and pages of crap stuff, cause we couldn’t find shit.

Geocities wasn't something you discovered via search. It was a directory you could explore, like walking through the streets of a city instead of cabbing it straight to a top-rated restaurant.

And then there were webrings, which allowed one to walk all over many different loosely related websites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
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