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How to make the internet small again

raptitude.com

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Re: How to make the internet small again

#21

Post by fleddr »

deergomoo wrote: post #14

“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 en…

I think you're misinterpreting the title, which admittedly is misleading.

It's not the internet itself being small, rather your exposure to it. In simpler times, you'd lead your normal "offline" life during the day and then at night one would have "computer time".

Now life is pretty much only "computer time", all day long.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#22

Post by 7thaccount »

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".

Thanks for linking to this. It looks like something I've been looking for if I understand it properly. It would be neat to have a barebones OS running on a tiny computer that you could access a simplified internet.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#23

Post by lariati »

So he is basically going to get bored and binge watch shows on Netflix for 3 days.

The irony to me is I would think curating a website like that is as big a problem as anything. That is going to take up way too much time and space in your brain.

Get rid of the blog, Netflix and social media then most the problems will go away.

No one is doomscrolling arXiv.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#24

Post by BoxOfRain »

orang2tang wrote: post #18
BoxOfRain wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 As far as I know TenFourFox is no longer maintained and nobody forked it either.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.

That's surprising! I'm a big fan of Tiger and that era of Apple hardware (I have another project in mind to cram a TB of storage into an iPod Mini) though it's a wonder that TenFourFox went on as long as it did really. Maintaining something as complex as a modern web browser for long-obsolete hardware sounds like a gargantuan task, I'd love to be involved in keeping it going but I think it'd be above my ability to meaningfully contribute to.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#25

Post by hombre_fatal »

orang2tang wrote: post #16
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.

Great search engine but it makes it depressingly clear how many text content sites are just forgotten “last updated: 2005” zombie sites still humming along only because nobody remembered to take them offline.

Though, through it I found that Neocities has a great “indie web” community. Good for them.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#26

Post by ziggus »

The internet is never going to be 'small' again. You can choose to deny the changing reality of the modern internet and stick your head in the sand, but it's going to be apps and centralization from here on out. Maybe DeFi will have some impact on moving the modern internet in a different direction, but indulging in nostalgia for the 'good old days' of Gopher and NNTP mean you're not contributing to the betterment of the current internet.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#27

Post by UweSchmidt »

deergomoo wrote: post #14

“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 en…

Yes, it was magical and unbounded, but it didn't represent reality at all. You couldn't really 'share', nothing went viral, nothing had societal impact. Culture was formed by mass media, reality formed by real life interactions and connections in public spaces; the "streets" were important.

I still remember this unconscious 'reaching out' to strangers in public (now all in their little bubbles, on their phones). I still kind of find myself expecting to meet some of the online figures in real life, to ground their wild claims of importance and glamour in my physical reality (which will never happen). With these experiences, making the internet small again might be possible.

Not so for this generation: The internet can only be big. That one bad tweet is reality, right there on the phone on the nightstand, always-on. There is no way to switch it off, to walk away, to go 'outside'. To find meaning, purpose, answers they have to go out and sift through it all. To find peace, that place needs to be sanitized. Sorry, those "weird little creations" will have to go...

Re: How to make the internet small again

#28

Post by grey_earthling »

ziggus wrote: post #26

The internet is never going to be 'small' again. You can choose to deny the changing reality of the modern internet and stick your head in the sand, but it's going to be apps and centralization from here on out. Maybe DeFi will have some impact on moving the modern internet in a different direction, but indulging in nostalgia for the 'good old days' of Gopher and NNTP mean you're not contributing to the betterment of…

If “the current internet” is centralisation and company control, then I don't want to contribute to the betterment of it. So this sounds like a win-win.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#29

Post by zozbot234 »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #27
deergomoo wrote: post #14

“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 en…

Yes, it was magical and unbounded, but it didn't represent reality at all. You couldn't really 'share', nothing went viral, nothing had societal impact. Culture was formed by mass media, reality formed by real life interactions and connections in public spaces; the "streets" were important. I still remember this unconscious 'reaching out' to strangers in public (now all in their little bubbles, on their phones). I st…

> Yes, it was magical and unbounded, but it didn't represent reality at all. You couldn't really 'share', nothing went viral, nothing had societal impact.

Memes could easily go viral on big decentralized platforms like Usenet, even in the early days. And their real-world impact increased gradually over the 1990s and 2000s, before reaching current levels with the mainstream adoption of smart mobile phones for Internet access, and big social media sites "pivoting" to take advantage of such.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#30

Post by mattlondon »

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".

I was reluctant to get involved with Gemini initially - it seemed like Gopher had already existed and could benefit from a revival, rather than someone creating something new (after all, Gopher+ actually offers some good possibilities for doing more modern things, and TLS support is now ubiquitous in gopher even if not officially in the spec)

Upon reading some more about Gemini though - especially solderpunk's "ponderings" phlog entries (https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?=zaibatsu.circumlunar....) that I grew to appreicate where gemini came from - a considered criticism of where gopher has not aged well. Gemini has grown to address some of those short comings and that is actually quite nice, and the main driving force for it came from an active user of gopher already so that seemed nice.

What I do find a bit annoying is gemini-the-protocol vs gemini-the-philosophy. E.g. there was a client (I forget the details - sorry) that introduced the concept of a unicode "favicon" and a few people lost their shit about it. Nothing was wrong with the favicon thing - it was totally legit use of the gemini protocol but people were angry about just the concept of a client making requests that they felt did not fit their view of what gemini "means", with various threats about blocking all users/IPs that made requests for a favicon etc.

I find this viewpoint from "small internet" proponents fairly sad and annoying. If the protocol allows it, who are they to say what is right or proper and what is not? It makes me want to write a gemini client that supports styling and some sort of "GeminiObjectModel" and javascript support purely out of principle/trolling-lolz :-)

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