A retrospective of my time on the internet
cleberg.net
A retrospective of my time on the internet
1–10 of 317 posts
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#2It's still there, at IRC/Usenet/some niche forums. Replace phreaking with maybe some mesh networks and ways to connect computers without calling an ISP.
There are still niche blogs and even phlogs.
And you can still use Pidgin and libpurple plugins to connect to a huge array of protocols. Ditto with core Biltbee or Bitlbee+libpurple allowing you to use any IRC client (even the ones without TLS for DOS and Win9X) to connect to modern networks such as Discord, Mastodon, Telegram and whatnot.
On games, well... JS and Itch.io ate Flash and indie/shareware games. But even today people creates hackroms (esp. Pokémon) and games for RPG Maker 2k/2k3 which they can be run under EasyRPG anywhere.
On loggin' in today:
- No Windows. Slackware in a NUC with a debblobbed kernel from Linux-Libre, propietary packages with Flatpak for corporate crap. OFC that's the work/HD movie player/libre 'high end' games, for the rest I use an n270 netbook with hyperbola.
- I update when I want, but slapt-get and flatpak do everything. On the netbook, I can spend ages without updating anything.
- No ads on any $GNULINUX or $BSD distro/branch.
- Dillo on the netbook, Librewolf on the NUC, Crapium because of $CORPORATE, isolated under bubblewrap and a separate user account. Is not my computing technically, so it's 'GNU kosher'.
- No browser nagging, ever.
- I have a either https://wiby.me or a blank homepage.
- I disabled remote searching for the URL bar.
- I don't use Google. DDG, searx and the like.
- Dillo and a hosts file cuts down both ads and cookies/trackers: https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts. On the NUC, using a browser with UBo today it's digitally suicidal.
- For news, I avoid all mainstream political bullshit except for:
https://sciencealert.com for good pop Science news
The Conversation's Spanish feed for Nature/Environment and Science news.
Finally, there's:
gopher://magical.fish Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#3The world I grew up in, no longer exists
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#4It's still there, at IRC/Usenet/some niche forums. Replace phreaking with maybe some mesh networks and ways to connect computers without calling an ISP. There are still niche blogs and even phlogs . And you can still use Pidgin and libpurple plugins to connect to a huge array of protocols. Ditto with core Biltbee or Bitlbee+libpurple allowing you to use any IRC client (even the ones without TLS for DOS and Win9X) to…
Nobody's there, though. And the old internet was shaped not just by technology, but by the people who were online
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#5Checks out... the Internet is the thing that more humans are working everyday to change than anything else on the planet.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#6The general internet is TV. Crammed with ads and useless information and low brow entertainment.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#7It looks like it starts with:
>I was born in the late 1990s
>2001: The Family Computer
I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to use Archie to find an FTP site and download a file based on the name.
Does that Internet exist anymore? Well Usenet is still around but since 2000 it is mostly spam or for sharing files now.
Then the author says:
> 2012: When Everything Started Changing
I think everything changed when Eternal September happened. When I first got on Usenet the older students told me to lurk for a month and always read the FAQ before asking a question. Then I started seeing all these annoying posts from people ending in @aol.com and that was when the Internet and Usenet really started to change.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#8> Turn on your computer - most likely Windows 10 or 11.
> You open your default browser - most likely Chrome.
> …your browser (most likely Google) will show you an AI summary…
> Once you solve all that, there's a cookie banner waiting for you that gives you two options:
> Oh wait, you're interrupted again. This site requires age verification to view its contents.
Those are your problems. Why not use Linux (or even macOS), Firefox, Kagi, Consent-O-Matic, and avoid websites with stupid captchas and age verification? (Not always possible for government and banking sites, but you use to need to be in person)
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#9My internet was gopher, Usenet, and the very beginnings of webpages at some universities. Much smaller. I don't miss it being only that. At the time it sucked when aol was attached to the academic internet and all of my usenet groups became unusable but now, yeah, things are much better with how vast and chaotic things are.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#10With enough pressure, corporate reliance may become unpopular and push people to become more sovereign.
The first time I realized there was no permission slip to setting up an onion service I remember thinking this is how it was supposed to be and shocked at the simplicity and ease.
I really don't think there is a big enough billboard about this. Id love to see the community build on top of these principles and make it even easier for the eventualality that people are going to want these abilities back. The ability to create spaces that are yours. Establish a mailbox that's yours. A social platform that's yours. Collaboration tools that are yours. A messaging platform that is yours, all running on hardware you own.
Building on the backbone of tor as the founding principles for the future.
I like the the term stable diffusion to describe this...(not the ai) we need stable diffusion of the simple idea that one can create their own spaces in cyberspace again.