261–270 of 273 posts
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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).
I 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…
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.
For example, host your own mail.
Do people host their own webservers anymore? (is a VPS is good enough?)
IRC? muds?
The rise of smartphones made "computing" accessible to everyone, but people can't actually compute.
Computers used to come with a language. You could write your own programs and run them from the getgo. You didn't have to ask permission to digitally sign your own program and run it.
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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.
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> 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…
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 think it's getting harder to "be your own person" digitally. For example, host your own mail. Do people host their own webservers anymore? (is a VPS is good enough?) IRC? muds? The rise of smartphones made "computing" accessible to everyone, but people can't actually compute. Computers used to come with a language. You could write your own programs and run them from the getgo. You didn't have to ask permission to d…
Ugh, yeah, good luck on this one. You can get by quite well using one of the major providers as an (outbound-only, if desired) gateway though.
> Do people host their own webservers anymore? (is a VPS is good enough?)
Yes and yes but mostly it's Docker hell
> IRC? muds?
They're both still around, albeit a shadow of their former selves. IRC is better than ever, use a client like The Lounge and it's basically(*) a modern chat app.
(* Okay, stuff like multi-line and message editing are still effectively missing, but you get embeds and whatnot)
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Then it isn't around. It's walled off. And it will disappear.
I’m somewhere in the middle on this. These communities are real, and the value of the content shared by users is real. On the one hand, I prefer the old open web. On the other, I can’t deny the existence and value of these walled gardens. The wall doesn’t erase the value, even if I strongly prefer there wasn’t a wall to begin with. To your point, discord comes with downsides, and does raise questions about the longev…
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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…
Lying is even easier if you can deny people access to the truth.
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.
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>We cannot tell all people below certain IQ to just stop using the internet Not directly, but we can ban children from the internet (or at least force them into read-only mode) via some legally enforced anonymized federal ID system. I'd accept the privacy risks associated with that in order to fix the internet.
I regret to inform you that IQ is not a function of age, and that you have forfeited your right to post. Please enjoy the read-only experience here until you grow up.