How can we go back? We’re already on the way back. It’s called the Fediverse.
I help pay for my instance to operate, and it’s a cost I’m happy to help shoulder.
Ehhhh, the OG internet connected better because all nodes were well connected. The Fediverse is a series of single servers that can’t even sync all data across themselves. It’s cute, but it’s post-it notes on strings atm
I wonder if there’s a more efficient way to have things sync in blocks or something. I honestly understand very little about server architecture, much less decentralized social network architecture. Maybe having a smaller number of “centralized” (community-run, redundant, independent) nodes distributing blocks of federated data to take load off the actual instance servers that would only need to upload bulk data to fewer places?
Maybe this isn’t very different from how it already operates. Fuck if I know.
Yep we have different lemmy/mastodon/etc… instances talking with one another. Anyone can set up something like activityhub. Its a fun place in my opinion!
Btw how do we stand on just blatantly copying and reposting material from reddit? I missed the announcement talking about that.
The Fediverse is a bit more like the old USENET days in some regards, but ultimately if it ever becomes more popular the same assholes that ruin other online experiences will also wind up here.
What made the Internet more exciting 30 years ago was that it was mostly comprised of the well educated and dedicated hobbyists, who had it in their best interest to generally keep things decent. We didn’t have the uber-lock-in of a handful of massive companies running everything.
It’s all Eternal September. There’s no going back at this point — any new medium that becomes popular will attract the same forces making the current Internet worse.
Exactly.
I’m interested in distributed applications (think BitTorrent, not ActivityPub), and my primary concern here is filtering. I want to be able to only see content from people I trust and people they trust (and so on), and if I do that well, I won’t have to see a ton of crap. That’s how regular relationships work, and I’d like to try my hand at it with anonymous relationships. Think something like Web of Trust, but adjusted for larger networks of people.
The Fediverse by design prevents this, while the internet of the old age had little if any guardrails against this specially since the platforms never really federated with another.
Did forum sites even federate? One forum sites would be dead and the next would have more activity. But what if the other forum with less activity was the one you wanted to use? The old internet was a good start but there’s a reason why it’s dominated by Instagram and Facebook, while email, you can use mostly any provider and not feel like you’re left out.
if it ever becomes more popular the same assholes that ruin other online experiences will also wind up here.
That’s kind of the glory of the fediverse, though. We can have communities using the same protocol that never interact with each other.
There can be completely separate fediverses that cater to different people.
No. The fediverse is just more of the same mindless gargling and regurgitation of mainstream media excrement that the internet has become, but federated.
It lacks the creativity, originality, experimentation, wonder, sheer life of the old internet.
It’s just as dead, enshittified, and riddled with misinformation bots as everything else.
Looked like the least worst alternative to reddit (which was the least worst replacement for what the internet used to be before reddit, and facebook, and the like, killed it).
Turns out it’s mostly reddit reposts (often by bots, which is ironic since the originals were also reddit reposts posted by bots) and US politics garbage, and even more susceptible than Reddit to power hungry mods and echo chambers.
I guess I’m just addicted to doomscrolling. Which is almost as depressing as the fact that this inane crumb of utterly useless and purposeless garbage is by far the least worst furuncle in the rotting bot infested corpse of the internet.
Whatever cool stuff someone posted on a forum 10-15 years ago can be found on the Fediverse, possibly even in better quality because people know how the internet works overall more then they did back then and we’re not all still using Windows XP. Now if you’re talking about the era of flash games, you shouldd try html5 games.
On the Fediverse you have the desk client, and web clients. If the fediverse isn’t creative you wouldn’t have a Misskey next to Maastodon which is it’s own thing all together not just another fork of Mastodon.
Can y make these claims make sense to me based on this logic I provided here.
My reading is that it’s not necessarily a problem with the platforms but society at large.
One example you mentioned: yes, html5 games (and just downloadable itch/steam games) exist and they fill the gap left by Flash games from a gameplay perspective maybe.
But the mainstream appeal of Flash games and animations was different to what we have now. The social phenomenon of people randomly hacking together terrible flash games isn’t the same as the current tiny indie game phenomenon. I feel like the old ones were a bigger piece of the average person’s internet usage than the new one (the average person’s internet usage being 5% LLM 5% web 5% email 25% gaming 30% video and 30% doomscrolling or something like that idk)
I’m struggling to put into words what I mean by this, my comment sounds really vague when I reread it. The specific creative outlet that Flash gave people is not equivalent to what we have now, and the specific entertainment experience of browsing and playing Flash games is different from the experience of scrolling through itch. Am I making more sense?
Like of course the different technologies are different, but it’s where it fits into our lives that it’s really different imo. Hell, we could say this about Flash itself for the last few years before it was discontinued. Just the two thoughts of Newgrounds in 2006 vs Newgrounds in 2016 and how they fit into the internet ecosystem and internet culture are enough to see the difference.
The fediverse is just a barnacle on the larger Internet at this point. It has to become more - we need to make our own web
The Fediverse is still a new concept and it’s gaining more usage then most other open source social medias. It’s the best we have, and more and more people land on it. (atleast going by some Mastodon metrics.) It’s not the biggest, but it’s actually impressive for an an opensource project what you do have for it’s userbase. I wish some people would understand that to an extent.
It’s what happened to the internet. Devices were dumbed down to make the internet accessible for everyone. Now the “normies” are also on the internet, whereas in the past they’d belittle you for spending time on the computer.
In time, the Fediverse will also be easily accessible. And where there are normies, you’ll find corporate enshittification.
Edit: thanks for the downvotes because I explained the word “normification”. You’re overthinking this. It’s a term that has been around since before Reddit became popular. It’s a term that stems from 4chan. I don’t like the term, I just explained it. And yes, the corpos are to blame but they couldn’t do the things they do without a certain user base. And that’s not your typical tech savvy user base. How is that so difficult to understand?
Normification is a facet of our undemocratic capitalism. As you see yourself as a consumer of the internet and not a citizen, you mostly assume that a thing being
- popular
- monetizable
- and convenient
is always preferable.
So the internet continues to have a huge potential to host many cool places, but
- they can’t reach users that might be interested
- gaining support from small donations is difficult
- and they can’t integrate a complete set of features, accessibility, design and content moderation.
If you ask an average internet user about these places, it’s a common response to say they’re weird as in not normal. If you dig a bit for what they mean, it’s usually the above. Nobody is there, it can’t make money and it doesn’t have all the things.
Is this some kind of attack on certain minority groups or am I over thinking this comment? I googled what normification meant and the results gave me some bad vibes regarding this comments direction.
2 ways to go back:
-
Corporations become less greedy.
-
Consumers and businesses stop tolerating abuse and consider other options that will temporarily inconvenience them.
Neither one seems likely. If it were we simply wouldn’t be here in the first place.
A few of us still remembers option 3) Regulation And also 4) Properly working anti-trust laws.
I’d argue there’s enough difference there to flag them separately. The original number two is more about personal responsibility; choose a different retailer, go to a different place, etc. Voting with your wallet so to speak.
Government regulation, while it’s still about people pushing back against companies, with the state of most western governments at the moment you can’t assume they will automatically have the public’s back. So there’s a tie in to the personal responsibility aspect by electing representatives who represent your interests, but given that’s not always feasible (either because not enough people share that view to get someone elected or because there isn’t a suitable candidate available to support) I would argue it’s distinct enough to warrant its own category.
Regulations and anti trust laws would both fall under a government intervention category though I think.
You are conflating Consumers with Citizens, a classic pitfall of modern neoliberal democracies.
Just because people willingly Consume a Product does not mean they think The Product is good or even that it should exist at all. Neoliberalism is unable to acknowledge that, because Everything is a Market and the Market is Infallible.
In reality, the game theory is such that individuals may not have the means to get out of the local minimum they found themselves stuck in. Prisoner’s dilemma and all that. That’s what representative democracy is supposed to solve, when it isn’t captured by ideology and corporate interests.
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.
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.
Libraries should evolve to play a larger role in the internet, theyve been trying to reinvent themselves and i think this best aligns with their spiritual purpose. Some ideas:
Caretakers of digital archives.
Caretakers of relevant open source projects.
Could I get a free domain with my library card?
Could I get free api access to mapping or other localized data?
Should libraries host local fediverse instances for civic users? (think police, firefighter alert, other community related feeds)
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.
The library is appealing to me because:
Precedence: pre internet I could connect to the library over a landlines and access the library and community news.
Expertise: not necessarily deep tech expertise, but with information retrieval, curation, education.
Community access: libraries are a municipal service with brick and mortar locations, and are heavily involved with community/public engagement.
For clarity, on the fediverse instance aspect. I was thinking more read only, with users being more official organizations with a barrier of entry vs. The general public. I personally wouldn’t want libraries to be moderating public discourse - this should be arms reach. And wouldn’t want them worrying about liability.
Public information (like safety bulletins for example) shouldn’t exclusively be sitting on a for profit ad platform, it’s bizarre.
How did we get here? Adtech, tracking, monetization.
Can we go back? By removing the ubiquitous affiliate marketing financial incentives, so no.
Yeah man. Last time YouTube was good was when people were making videos just for fun, not for clout.
I’ve thought about this. Essentially, whenever a channel gets moderately successful they will be contacted by various agencies trying to ‘sponsor’ them.
All the people that make video for fun hardly get seen, and if they do it’s not long before they sell out.
Don’t be silly, the proletariat just needs to unite, seize the nuclear stockpiles of at least two nations capable of destroying all life on earth in defense of the oligarchy’s hoards, and then decentralize ownership of the global communication infrastructure.
Easy.
Go back to site directories.
Curate your news feed.
Stop using a single corporate search engine.
Participate in online social communities, not in social media.
