Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to make the internet small again

raptitude.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 60 posts

Re: How to make the internet small again

#51

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

> nothing went viral

Things didn't have societal impact, but viral was things were there at least since the 90's. Normally dumb jokes like that email propagating virus that instructed you to scratch all your disks and forward the email to all your contacts.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#52

Post by 6510 »

Before the internet I use to joke that if humans had slightly better memory and slightly more intellect we would sit on the sofa and stare at the wall all day.

There use to be a guy on youtube who decided to document his dreams as they were getting surprisingly weird. He would fly out of his body towards the sun where many kinds of creatures lived. They had invited him, had incredibly long life spans and vastly superior intellect. When he brought up their intelligence they laughed and said there were many species with much greater intellect than theirs, above them many layers with more and more intelligent species. Each would feel dumb by comparison with the layer above. "We are undeveloped enough to show an interest in humans." Those above look at you like you look at ants. They then took him to an artifact or learning device left behind by truly sophisticated life forms. It looked like a book to him because humans think of books as containers of knowledge. He was allowed to look at the book from far far away and told not to get closer. His mind raged with thoughts and visions. What happens if I get closer? Then the book absorbs you. You will acquire so much information you wont be able to recall what little you knew before today. You would no longer exist. Only a few of the sun dwellers got close enough to touch it but it took hundreds of years to let the information sink in.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#53

Post by hypertele-Xii »

jacquesm wrote: post #9
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #5

By including a time cost to every link on a page that legitimate creators are willing to pay but cripples content farms. A simple cryptographic signature that takes, say, 1 hour on commodity hardware to calculate. Good bye SEO spam.

Hello cryptographic signature computing botnet...

Surely a botnet that is forced to waste time computing signatures before submitting spam is better than one that can just submit spam right away? You can't absolutely secure anything, just make it more expensive.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#54

Post by puggsy »

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…

I'm part of a small-moderate sized open source community.

We communicate via IRC/Signal, code via Git, and share knowledge via blogs, Mastodon, and talks.

It feels small and nice.

The fact that the rest of the Internet has grown into a different direction doesn't change that.

The pie is now bigger and largely corporate driven, and I'm okay not being part of that.

Is that so bad?

Re: How to make the internet small again

#55

Post by 7thaccount »

anthk wrote: post #49
foxfluff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping I could find a community interested in.. I don't want to say exactly "low tech" computing but I guess the idea is pretty close. Cheap microcontrollers today are incredibly powerful.

Alpine Linux, sacc and cgnml as Gopher/Gemini clients. CWM+Urxvt as the only X interface, because Gemini uses Unicode and the framebuffer support is not that complete. Alpine should be installed with a diskless/RAM mode, so there are no FS changes commited unless you do an "lbu commit -d". Once you set up sacc, cgnml, and nsxiv for pictures, (and maybe moc for music) there's nothing much more to save. On hw basis, ma…

Thank you! I'll have to Google some of these terms though.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#56

Post by mro_name »

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…

the lines rarely are the issue but the copper-cable length from home to the DSLAM:

Less cable-meters mean less reachable households per DSLAM. And the DSLAM costs - both hardware and maintenance. Regardless if 2 or 20 customers connect. So the carrier wants to conect as many as possible and so they have to suffer cable length.

Re: How to make the internet small again

#57

Post by mro_name »

anthk wrote: post #50
mro_name wrote: post #2

The Low-Tech-Magazine proposes a speed limit to the internet: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/can-the-internet-r... High speed wipes out distances and dramatically increases pressure. Both in real (topology!) and cyber.

Gemini and Gopher/Usenet/IRC would perfectly work under "dataless" phone connections where the speed is capped to 128k. I tried it and it worked as fast as a fiber connection.

Ascii makes copper fiber!

Or the way round: website obesitiy crisis[1] makes fiber copper!

[1] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

Re: How to make the internet small again

#58

Post by hammyhavoc »

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…

Uh, tons of things went viral. Memes existed online long before "social media", going back to the 80s. Plenty of things had societal impact.

I'm guessing you weren't online in the CompuServe era? Never been on Usenet for anything other than modern-day piracy?

More modern pre-social media example, YTMND was 2001.

Post reply on HN