It isn’t just corporations that have ruined everything, it’s spammers and scammers and cybercriminals too. Searching any topic these days is a crapshoot, with a high likelihood of falling into a spammer’s tarpit.

To me it feels like the internet is evolving into a virtual Dark Forest. We float around in these little bubbles of sanity, hiding amid a yawning expanse of seething chaos.

History tells us there’s also a release valve of a swift brick to the side of the head, one brick per billionaire.

It sounds messier than paying taxes, to me. But I’m not a billionaire, so I can’t say I understand their motives.

im doing 2 actually.

I’ve said before and I’ll say again. I would use the option on amazon for shipping that says “let your employees pee”. I get my package 2-3 days later. Oh well. I don’t give a shit. I’d rather normalize companies treating people like people. And if I get my limited edition pez dispenser 3 days later, so be it.

Not like it’s an oxygen tank.

1 can be solved with regulation or nationalization. Services online should be public services. Like school, police, roads. You can still have private alternatives too.

A few of us still remembers option 3) Regulation And also 4) Properly working anti-trust laws.

Indeed, Reddit was a great example of this. All of the stupid things they tried to pull off in the past few years (selling user data, turning off the API, insulting their users, VPN blocking, to name a few) would have not worked when they were a growing website. Now that they have so many low quality users, they can do that successfully because they know that said users are too dumb to realize how they’re being abused. Even larger websites like Twitter and Facebook operate this way.

The takeaway here is: don’t focus on having many users, focus on having good users. All relationships are a two-way street, and if you’re on the side of the street with too many people, you don’t have any personal leverage on your own. It’s in your best interests to get out of that relationship.

Cyberpunk, let’s go 😂

we’re a smaller part

Quality trumps quantity anytime.

How about BBSs? If you want to spam at 1200 baud, you had better be dedicated.

Return the internet to the pre-“smart” phone era, in which a minimum bar of effort and knowledge needed to be present in order to connect and participate on the web.

Yeah. I think that’s happening now. The public will discover the Fediverse, but I’m not sure if they’ll be welcomed into every community here.

We’re in Eternal September now. Have been for a few decades.

I agree to an extent, but the problem is not so much the normies themselves as it is the massive commercial market they represent. You might point to mainstream social media as evidence of a problem with the people themselves, but you would be overlooking the fact that the surveillance and attention economies have meant these social media platforms are deliberately designed to position people against one another to drive engagement so these companies can charge more to advertisers. Discourse on the internet isn’t getting worse because there are more bad people online, it’s getting worse because companies have a financial incentive to turn us into bad people when we are online.

The normies are not the problem, they are the victims. The abusers are the giant corporation manipulating the masses and monetizing a publicly funded infrastructure for their own gains.

It’s fascinating how the absolute majority of people is trying to solve both social and technical problems at the same time via only social or only technical means. Again and again.

You need both.

Fediverse works right for moderation, but technically communities and users are part of an instance, and an instance is a physical thing that may go down. Just like most of our Web has vanished. And also, of course, it uses Web technologies.

Further my idea as to what should be done about this (one approach is Nostr, unloved here because of people who use it ; I also think it’s too primitive):

The storage must be full p2p. Like Freenet, but probably optimized so that people would only store what they themselves need, and give some space to others in the communities they participate in. Not to all the network, like Freenet, but only to whom they want.

The identities should be “federated”, as in communities allowing moderation. Moderation should be done via signed “delete” records, and users would then not replicate “deleted” information.

This way even when “an instance goes down” (say, instance admin has lost their private key or something like that), its stuff will still be replicated.

One can even make “an instance” inherit another instance (again, instance admin has lost their private key or, say, someone has stolen it), so that its users would replicate that.

One can imagine many mechanisms on top of that. But what’s described would allow libraries and allows a thing similar to DNS (again, like a community, to which you subscribe for naming service that associates names with entities) and a thing similar to a static website, and something like Usenet with user identities, moderation and communities.

Dynamic websites are possible too - but I’m not really knowledgeable about smart contracts and such required for it.

I’m actually describing something in the middle of a few things far smarter people are already doing.

This would allow agility between social and technical solutions.

I’m very much onboard with this. Idk if I’d say it’s the libraries job though, I think it should be at the city level for community instances.

can we go back?

No!

Still is 😉

Yes, selfhost most essential services like mail, messengers, web search, piped frontend, vpn, and other things like gitea/forgejo and jellyfin, web 3.0 will be federated network

So far we’re doing a great job at keeping profits out of the equation. Let’s see if it lasts.

neocities

this is very nice thank you

Oh my gosh, there’s webrings! That used to be such a good way to find new websites in a given topic.