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The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

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Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#351

Post by LAC-Tech »

kstrauser wrote: post #5

I sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine . I made that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned that service from end to end and had completely…

sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine. I made that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned that service from end to end and had completely freedom to do whatever I wanted with it.

Isn't this easier to this than it ever was?

Granted, my 'server' is a VM in a server farm thousands of kilometres away, but I installed the server and wrote the HTML. What's even better is that he server was caddy and the html is html5 - both a marked improvement!

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#352

Post by notreallyserio »

jackson1442 wrote: post #59
pavlov wrote: post #30

> 'Some people use the term "Web 3.0" to refer only to decentralized blockchain-based networks without considering that all personal websites have essentially the same goals, be they on the regular Internet or on the new blockchain networks. Those who use the term "web 3.0" seem to have forgotten that self-hosted personal websites that run on home servers and are accessible over the regular Internet are inherently de…

I got bored the other day and thought it would be funny to make a copy of the most expensive NFT and set that as my Twitter profile picture because they added that silly feature. So I downloaded MetaMask, got everything set up, and went to one of the NFT marketplaces to try to make one. Uploaded the image and got a big scary warning: > (paraphrased; I don't have a screenshot) This image was found too many times on th…

> Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much easier than creating a user/pass for every site- just click Sign and go.

I agree. The only thing missing is a way to recover your account (wallet) if you lose or forget your password.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#353

Post by naasking »

meheleventyone wrote: post #349
naasking wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being charitable I think they mean some sort of betting site where people put money behind opinions and lose it if they are wrong or gain it if they are correct. Giving a sort of wisdom of the crowds. They're called prediction markets, and they already exist! * https://www.predictit.org * https://www.metaculus.com/questions/

Ahh, creeping dystopia!

I dunno, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea. Exploiting the wisdom of the crowds to make predictions could be a very good thing in fact. Unfortunately they fall afoul of gambling laws in some states/countries, so they're pretty limited right now. Scott does a decent overview here:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/metaculus-monday

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#354

Post by neutronicus »

unsungNovelty wrote: post #328
executesorder66 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason a subreddit wouldn't work for that community? Or is that not "forumy" enough? I'm genuinely curious.

Apart from privacy concerns like Twitter and Reddit sharing your data with FB (Maybe they share with Google too, not entirely sure), you create a healthier community in a forum than Reddit, Twitter etc. This would be different if you are in a subreddit for a niche topic, sure. But there are higher chances of creating healthy online interactions in Forums than a subreddit. You meet with regulars more often. Knowledge…

Yeah, and I'll jump in with a contrary opinion.

I think people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on forums, and nicer on Discord than either.

My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in. The fact that this kind of thing gets quarantined to a downvoted sub-tree (on Reddit) or just scrolls into the past, accessible only by search (on Discord) helps keep these new community platforms a lot less toxic.

And yeah, the newer platforms (especially Discord) are maybe a little less valuable as pure stores of knowledge, but I think the structural resistance to domination by assholes is very valuable.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#355

Post by jjgreen »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #27
kstrauser wrote: post #5

I sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine . I made that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned that service from end to end and had completely…

I'm sympathetic. My first personal website (after a couple of, ahem, not personal ones) was about the film "The English Patient", and yes, I know that smile. However, I think you're making a mistake that I also make quite often, of conflating the use and mastery of the technology required with the actual end goal. Lots of people might like to create their own dedicated websites focused on some particular interest of…

Elaine Benes : [quietly] No. I can't do this any more. I can't. It's too long.

Elaine Benes : [yells] Quit telling your stupid story about the stupid desert, and just die already! DIE!

J. Peterman : [surprised] Elaine, you don't like the movie?

Elaine Benes : [shouts] I hate it!

[the audience shushes Elaine]

Elaine Benes : [shouts back] Oh, go to hell!

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#356

Post by awild »

imglorp wrote: post #345
unsungNovelty wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from privacy concerns like Twitter and Reddit sharing your data with FB (Maybe they share with Google too, not entirely sure), you create a healthier community in a forum than Reddit, Twitter etc. This would be different if you are in a subreddit for a niche topic, sure. But there are higher chances of creating healthy online interactions in Forums than a subreddit. You meet with regulars more often. Knowledge…

Reddit is as always a mixed experience. I think any successful forum depends heavily on its mods (notably like this one) to maintain community and civility, to remove spam, abuse, brigading, and astroturfing. This works despite the corporation trying to monetize with both hands. Reddit still has some subs with good mod teams where kind, productive communities are carrying on. This could happen on any decent forum sof…

I agree a lot with this. I'm in a lot of niche groups of my hobbies and of those most are really quite trash (usually pedantic ideological battles) even if they claim to be otherwise. There's however one that has such a strong moderation team that it's become a kind of meme, BUT the discussions if they do happen are always strong and factual by a weird mix of industry professionals and hobbyists alike, with a good focus on citation and cross referencing.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#357

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

erulabs wrote: post #155
corobo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can +1 a database `views` column without storing anything at all about the user. If you’re just doing that you’re good to go

I mean, most "unique view counters" store the users IP address, so that would be right out. I'm fairly sure even being aware of what complying with a complex legal documents implies constitutes enough of a complication that it's worth mentioning. It is a complication, but I believe it's worded so that small companies and individuals are immune from its consequences.

As long as you can describe the full extent to which the collected IP addresses are being used and which data they are being correlated with, and use a language comprehensible without requiring a legal degree, you can very easily be compliant. Once you involve an undisclosed number of "trusted partners" and start using weasel words to describe what you're using the data for and who you're giving them to, not so much.

That said, an IP address is a shitty device to detect unique visitors. Session cookies, as long as you aren't trying to correlate them to usage patterns and such, are more reliable (you can tell that this is the same phone jumping networks, or you can tell apart users coming from behind multiple layers of NAT) and anonymous.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#358

Post by 0x445442 »

heurisko wrote: post #318
leokennis wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not miss the old internet per se, but I do feel sad that in 1997 I had a 56K dial in modem on a Pentium II running Internet Explorer and today I have a 1Gbps connection on a M1 MacBook running a modern browser, and web performance is still more or less the same. Instead of spending our extra processing power and bandwith on useful stuff, we spent it on tracking and JS frameworks and other bullshit.

> sad that in 1997 I had a 56K dial in modem on a Pentium II running Internet Explorer and today I have a 1Gbps connection on a M1 Images took ages to download on 56k. Performance today is vastly better. There are cases where progress has moved backwards eg. new buggy JS Reddit, but I by no means have rose tinted spectacles for the past.

There was a period between 1996-2000 where we had broadband and the old web and it was faster than today. But I remember an article in Wired around 2000 about two guys that owned a diamond business in Canada who moved to L.A. to start a dotcom for their business. They moved back to Canada after a year and their assessment was the web was nothing more than a massive direct marketing platform. I wish I can find that article because it was quite prophetic.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#359

Post by sumtechguy »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #158
matheusmoreira wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. That sense of ownership has been lost. Now corporations own everything. Nobody wants a domain, they want a @name on some social media platform. Nobody wants their own website, they want to post on social media. ISPs have cgNAT now, nobody is directly connected to the internet. Everything is just so boring .

> That sense of ownership has been lost. Now corporations own everything. Nobody wants a domain, they want a @name on some social media platform. Nobody wants their own website, they want to post on social media. I don't think the self-hosting people with their own domains ever went away. They're all still out there. The difference is that the internet isn't just for those people any more. Everyone is online, and the…

A lot of what used to happen was a form of altruism. You had to be willing to give up time, money, and hardware to dedicate running many of these tings. That works if you are getting along with everyone. But once you get a 'troll', or some demanding person, or need money because lost job, etc that altruism wears extremely thin. So outsourcing it to some other company to pay, for and keep the software up to date is extremely alluring. There are still people willing to do it. But they will come and go but mostly 'go'. But if you think about it, it makes sense. Someone new coming in is not going to pick up 20+ year old BBS software unless they really want that. They are going to rock onto existing platform and start there. Then in 10 years their members will realize 'if you dont own it you are renting it, if you are renting it you are at the whim of the owner'.

Re: The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

#360

Post by superkuh »

rambambram wrote: post #309
superkuh wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is part of why I've loved running my .com webserver from my home desktop for the last 20+ years. I can see the blinking (and hear, and feel the vibration of) what's going on and insert in custom messages to the directory listing or other pages to talk to visitors. They can talk back by appending "/@say/Their message here." to any URL. I do miss the old days when you could run an open netcat on a popular port and…

Your comment method is so nice. Is there a reason you don't use a textarea for visitors to enter the text? Is your current method better against spambots?

It is a bit atypical because I wanted a purely static comment system for my static site. Using nginx to just log certain matching URL types to a custom log file was way safer and easier to maintain than anything written in a dynamic language accepting arbitrary internet input. I eventually adapted this approach to receiving webmentions as well and in that context I provide textarea input for webmention response URLs.

My method is not better against spam bots but it does suffer from a different type of them. For example, if a spider follows a link it sees of an existing comment, "...com/something.jpg/@say/..." then my system will interpret that as a comment. So... spam bots don't see it, but normal spiders can cause spam.

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