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We need to rewild the internet

noemamag.com

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Re: We need to rewild the internet

#251

Post by account42 »

kombookcha wrote: post #202
sapphicsnail wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wilder doesn't necessarily equal more anonymous. I spend a lot of time on little forums where I might not know someone's irl name but I know who they are.

One of the great losses that came with the end of the forum era was all these little communities with distinct cultures and regulars that you got to know. I kind of found a similar vibe in some discord servers, but they're much more difficult to join as a new user than a forum because old information isn't easily searchable and discussions aren't as longform as old forum posts were.

There are still active forums you know.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#252

Post by NikkiA »

idle_zealot wrote: post #191
jozzas wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally the point of the article. That's all posted inside the twitter walled garden. Great content, wrong platform.

RSS handles syndication, but how would their deep-dives be discoverable if they had been posted to personal blog sites? That's a missing piece of the puzzle for the distributed web; curation and recommendation are ad-hoc and don't scale.

We need stumbleupon back, and not some overly heavy attempt at it like cloudhiker is.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#253

Post by mauvehaus »

dhosek wrote: post #167
mauvehaus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested in a link. Live At Carnegie Hall was my paper-writing music in college. I discovered later that I don't much care for it when I don't have anything else occupying my mind. I'm unsure if it's because there isn't really that much to the songs of if I'm missing some nuance and complexity that makes them worth another listen.

I believe this is the one I found: https://www.paulmorellimusic.com/notes-on-chicago-transit-au...

Thank you!

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#254

Post by fullspectrumdev »

valdiorn wrote: post #207
fullspectrumdev wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaguely sensible initial setup (doable from a template or script) and automatic updates (enable these from a script) solves like 99% of this problem.

someone should make a GUI and a subscription service for that. Oh wait, you just invented the current state of the web :/

Honestly, there might be some value in a simple (free) desktop/mobile GUI wrapper that just deploys a “your web presence” container somewhere.

The often maligned “setup wizard” UI a lot of us remember from not so long ago actually was kinda neat in many ways.

Run “I want a website app” and click through a few simple menus that ask you questions to get you set up with a domain, email, hosting, etc. The defaults would be a selection of ideally smaller/non-FAANG providers, with some power-user menu or some shit gated behind a checkbox.

Then it just saves a document with your new CMS/etc logins, and away you go.

I guess you could even make a few bucks off it by using referral codes or whatever to fund development cost.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#255

Post by sowbug »

account42 wrote: post #243
sowbug wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My daughter asked me to set her up with a blog on her own server. We did it, and there is now a Hello World post somewhere out there on the web. But it wasn't a good experience, compared to what I know posting on Instagram is like. And that's just on the publishing side. The chances of her site being even indexed, let alone visited, is tiny. It's surprising* that rolling your own on the web has gotten harder, not eas…

But why care about whether your daughter's site is indexed. Share it with friends and if there is actually interesting content on there they will share it further. This whole idea that search engines are the be all and end all of being on the web and once you have visitors you need to somehow capture them is a big part of what is wrong with the web IMO. I much prefer a more organic web where people put themselves out…

Part of the fun of publishing is having readers. But even if you're OK nominating specific readers rather than letting anonymous ones find you, you wouldn't believe how skills like clicking a link have atrophied. You can send someone a URL, and they won't actually click on it because it arrived on their phone, they wanted to look at it on a laptop (because it's your kid's grandma who can't see well anymore), and they can't remember how to scroll back in SMS history, let alone send themselves a link.

So what do they do instead? They type into their browser, and then call me asking if they should buy McAfee because the computer says they have a virus.

I agree that search engines are not the only way to reach content on the web (web != social networks). But for most people today, they are.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#256

Post by efields »

SamBam wrote: post #79
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.

To do what? People want to post, share pictures, share video. The gardens arose to do this more easily than setting it up yourself. There's no driving force to work outside these gardens.

Let's take LiveJournal or MySpace… those services arose out of an interesting time when the metaphor of daily posting on the web was novel to a lot of people. Sharing photos on the web was novel so Flickr was created. During these times, folks are figuring out the design patterns of the web that get crafted in HTML/CSS/JS and now they've all but been standardized and commodified by Meta et al.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#257

Post by kristov »

DoItToMe81 wrote: post #226
kristov wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The barrier to entry for running your own site (something dynamic, as opposed to static hosting) is essentially the same in 2024 as it was in 2004. Gotta get a domain (and keep it registered). Gotta have an SSL cert (letsencrypt makes it better). Raspberry pi can run a lot, but getting your consumer ISP to give you a static IP is still more money. Definitely more VPS options now though. But self hosting your still ba…

It absolutely is not. Google has been downranking 'outdated' formats for years, and there is a dearth of independent communities to draw members from. Discovery is harder now than it has been at any point in the past.

That's fair from the discovery side. I was referring to the "supply side": how do we get more people creating content for the web, where they fully own that content? I used the web a fair amount before Google, and I don't recall having a problem finding content. Maybe my expectations were lower. Maybe my attention span was longer. I remember spending a lot of time in "indexes", browsing by topic. Now I use DDG exclusively. When I accidentally use Google I am increasing shocked by the low quality. I am also asking chatgpt to discover what to search for, which I find really effective. I feel like rewilding the internet will require users to try harder. Which I guess means encouraging users to understand why they should try harder.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#258

Post by sowbug »

crtasm wrote: post #222
sowbug wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My daughter asked me to set her up with a blog on her own server. We did it, and there is now a Hello World post somewhere out there on the web. But it wasn't a good experience, compared to what I know posting on Instagram is like. And that's just on the publishing side. The chances of her site being even indexed, let alone visited, is tiny. It's surprising* that rolling your own on the web has gotten harder, not eas…

Aren't all the hosts offering one-click wordpress/similar installs as easy as it's ever been?

The number of clicks required to get to that one click is quite high. The competition is Instagram, which actually has a negative number of clicks to get going (they won't let you continue browsing without an account).

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#259

Post by ajuc »

account42 wrote: post #246
ajuc wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would disappear anyway. All those personal webpages will be lost in time, like images hosted on long-dead servers and phpbb forums. "Internet never forgets" is one of these naive fairytales we told ourselves when we were young and internet was new, along with "information wants to be free", "censorship on the internet is impossible", and "easy access to information helps democracy". I prefer open web for sentiment…

> It would disappear anyway. All those personal webpages will be lost in time, like images hosted on long-dead servers and phpbb forums. Some will disappear. Others are maintained, sometimes by third parties. Many of them are on web.archive.org. Yes, we should build better solutions to retain random personal webpages but the sitations isn't really that dire. > "Internet never forgets" This has alwasy been in the cont…

Misinformation wants to be free just as much as information. Removing information is the wrong strategy, because internet makes publishing information so much easier. And bitrot+time will effectively remove the information for you if you just make people look elsewhere for long enough.

So you just put out 10 different lies for every truth you want to cover. Most people won't be bothered to check what is actually true. Human attention span is the limiting factor of modern world, not the access to information. Lying to people is easier than ever before in history, so democracy is in fact getting worse over time.

Re: We need to rewild the internet

#260

Post by arromatic »

xnx wrote: post #225
arromatic wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate more ? I don't use tiktok so i don't have much idea.

TikTok is probably the easiest way for any average person to put content on the internet. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are still more intimidating than "point phone and hit record". Because it is so easy to put something on TikTok more people than every are posting things to the world (not just to friend/family groups) than ever. The content I comes from people who range in age from teenage to retiree, from every…

Seems interesting but seems like tiktok dosen't like me. I clicked the link and all i got was some terrible hyper localized content youtube won't even recommend . But it's good to see newcomers to get chance . The search seems awful i search some stuff in english and it showed me unrelated content. How is it dethroning youtube ?
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