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How to make the internet small again

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Re: How to make the internet small again

#11

Post by tomatodevice »

jacquesm wrote: post #8
DocTomoe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse is the unpredictability ... my family in a 150-souls-village in the middle of nowhere got FTTH a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, I am happy to get 6 MBit/s in central Berlin.

That's pretty easy to understand though: that 150 soul village is in the middle of a much less dense area than the heart of Berlin, so a line that would pretty much always be saturated in Berlin will have plenty of capacity left in that small village. For the best - and cheapest - bandwidth: total deregulation of telcos. Like what happened in Romania, which has the cheapest and best connectivity of any European count…

I'm not sure if I prefer a slow ftth deployment or the spaghetti cabling of hell from Bucharest streets. There must be a way to do it correctly...

Re: How to make the internet small again

#12

Post by JKCalhoun »

I've had a nagging idea to knock together a small app (using a WebView, MacOS) that takes you to, for example, Hacker News and that's it.

No URL text field where you can type in a different address — perhaps a just back button. In other words, a wildly gimped web browser to keep my surfing much, much more focused.

I have no idea if I can trust myself to stick to just launching that app in the morning, leaving aside the standard browser. I'm not sure if a diet of only HN is smart or right or would make me happier.

Just a thought I've had.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#13

Post by jacquesm »

tomatodevice wrote: post #11
jacquesm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty easy to understand though: that 150 soul village is in the middle of a much less dense area than the heart of Berlin, so a line that would pretty much always be saturated in Berlin will have plenty of capacity left in that small village. For the best - and cheapest - bandwidth: total deregulation of telcos. Like what happened in Romania, which has the cheapest and best connectivity of any European count…

I'm not sure if I prefer a slow ftth deployment or the spaghetti cabling of hell from Bucharest streets. There must be a way to do it correctly...

Last I lived there (2015) it was very well organized and more reliable than most other infrastructure in Romania.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#14

Post by deergomoo »

“The internet was small compared to your real life, which was something that happened offline.”

Perhaps the author is more extroverted than me (almost certainly, actually), but I find this interesting. What attracted me to the internet as a kid in the early 2000s was just how huge it was even then.

Sure, you had to go looking for stuff rather than having it shovelled in front of you en masse, but there was such an enormous world of weird little creations that had nowhere else to exist. Stuff to see and people to speak to that I simply never would be able to otherwise.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#15

Post by orang2tang »

I bought an iBook G4 1.33ghz single-core with 512mb of RAM and 40gb spinning disk to use as my daily driver. It's perfect for reading Wikipedia and other text-based sites and I just found a really good Bible program specifically made for OSX 10.4. I feel very focused as I don't get side-tracked by YouTube because I can't run it! I almost never program outside of work unless I have an idea for something so I put my more powerful Macbook in the closet!

It has definitely brought adventure back to the internet for me instead of the YouTube algorithm kicking my ass every day recommending stuff that I NEED to watch.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#16

Post by orang2tang »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #12

I've had a nagging idea to knock together a small app (using a WebView, MacOS) that takes you to, for example, Hacker News and that's it. No URL text field where you can type in a different address — perhaps a just back button. In other words, a wildly gimped web browser to keep my surfing much, much more focused. I have no idea if I can trust myself to stick to just launching that app in the morning, leaving aside t…

This would also be good for something like https://search.marginalia.nu/ where the results you'll get are mostly text-based.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#17

Post by BoxOfRain »

orang2tang wrote: post #15

I bought an iBook G4 1.33ghz single-core with 512mb of RAM and 40gb spinning disk to use as my daily driver. It's perfect for reading Wikipedia and other text-based sites and I just found a really good Bible program specifically made for OSX 10.4. I feel very focused as I don't get side-tracked by YouTube because I can't run it! I almost never program outside of work unless I have an idea for something so I put my mo…

How do you get a modern browser on Tiger these days? As far as I know TenFourFox is no longer maintained and nobody forked it either.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#18

Post by orang2tang »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #17
orang2tang wrote: post #15

I bought an iBook G4 1.33ghz single-core with 512mb of RAM and 40gb spinning disk to use as my daily driver. It's perfect for reading Wikipedia and other text-based sites and I just found a really good Bible program specifically made for OSX 10.4. I feel very focused as I don't get side-tracked by YouTube because I can't run it! I almost never program outside of work unless I have an idea for something so I put my mo…

How do you get a modern browser on Tiger these days? As far as I know TenFourFox is no longer maintained and nobody forked it either.

I found a version of TenFourFox that has the moniker "7450" which you can find in their historical releases https://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/. I wasn't expecting it to work and then it just did.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#20

Post by marginalia_nu »

SyzygistSix wrote: post #19
nonrandomstring wrote: post #10

Gemini space has been my most interesting discovery in 2022. It seems to have the potential to deliver what most people say they want from a progressive "small internet" ie. not a nostalgic "old internet".

Gemini space? What is this?

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
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