8 ms·

Well, that's the problem with the whole internet. Remember those pages created in the 90s/early 2000s? People thought they were sharing information to the whole

Well, that's the problem with the whole internet. Remember those pages created in the 90s/early 2000s? People thought they were sharing information to the whole world. It turns out that most pages created in the 90s are now inaccessible or have been siloed by big corporations. The fact that we allowed corporations to take over the internet made it an inhospitable place for everyone else without corporate backing.

methodin 6y ago
Seems like a fundamental truth of Capitalism: privatization and ultimate destruction of anything that can be monetized. Certain things are impossible without money and to make money to have to generate or consume something which leads to a never-ending cycle.
zrm 6y ago
I don't think it's any harder to create a website than it ever was. The problem seems to be that corporations have made it so easy to do it within their silos that people aren't willing to spend ten hours on something they could do in ten minutes, not realizing that they're going to spend a lot more than ten hours creating content which the company will then vaporize at random whenever they feel like it.
- quaintdev 6y ago
  A decade ago, there use to be celebrity websites which had forums, galleries, blogs now it's just Instagram. Hell so many prominent celebrities don't even own a domain name in their name. Also, it's not like the content has improved. Earlier their use to be HQ images in those celeb galleries now the highest resolution image is 1200x1200. The only thing that has improved is how easily a celebrity can reach millions everything else has gone downhill with respect to discussions, forums, galleries, blogs. Most of these are replaced by poor comments section. It's not just celebrities, so many independent artists are putting up their talent on Instagram and I don't have access to any of it because I need an Instagram account for that. Instagram web version is forcing to sign up if you scroll 1 page down on a profile. Sometimes I feel like we need to build cutting edge decentralized applications that will burn these walled gardens to the ground. /rant
  - r3trohack3r 6y ago
    The only thing that has improved is how easily a celebrity can reach millions From Wikipedia: Celebrity is a reference to the fame and wide public recognition of an individual or a group I'd posit that celebrities are celebrities by connecting with millions. A platform that offers a "celebrity" the ability to connect easily with millions seems to be worth more than a list of any other features.
    - zeckalpha 6y ago
      What has changed is the meaning of the word connected.
  - MYEUHD 6y ago
    >I don't have access to any of it because I need an Instagram account for that. Check out https://bibliogram.art https://bibliogram.art
    - JoblessWonder 6y ago
      502 Bad Gateway
      - aspenmayer 6y ago
        Old link. Here ya go https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/ https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/
        aspenmayer 6y ago
        For what it’s worth, the original link is back up again.
    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/ https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/
- clusterfish 6y ago
  A lot of people, clubs and businesses publish their content on Facebooks and Instagrams because those platforms are better for getting your content out to your followers and more people. They are being rational. Where's the non-proprietory decentralized platform that lets me reach as many people as I can on Facebook? There isn't one. Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way? Facebook is 16 years old. That was a lot of time to figure out an alternative solution, but all we have are experimental projects that rely on adoption that they don't have to be useful. Corporations aren't going to change how they behave, but it's annoying that us techies are apparently incapable of beating them at our own game.
  - Avicebron 6y ago
    More often than not, the "game" trends toward market capture and acquire + kill or absorb business strategies. At a certain size that's hard for anyone to beat.
  - zrm 6y ago
    > Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way? Newsfeed is RSS/Atom. Identity / friends / followers are really one package, and it isn't a thing browsers can solve on their own, because people want the ability to do password resets etc. Also, decentralized identity is somewhat the opposite of this anyway -- people don't want to use the same "identity" for their parents and their friends and their boss. The best way to do this is for sites to use email as identity, because it's common and gives you password resets, but people can create more than one and separate them as they like. Which the technology to do already exists, but Facebook and Google made it easy and the free software equivalent takes several hours to get running. Which we could fix, but haven't (yet).
    - clusterfish 6y ago
      Sure RSS exists, and I use it, but it's not even built-in to (most) browsers anymore. You open an RSS link in the browser and it spits out XML garbage. Wat. RSS is sadly not enough on its own without the other puzzle pieces. Private feeds are not really a thing, it doesn't let you comment on or like or share the article to your friends, etc.
- mc32 6y ago
  Yep, it’s even worse. There are some things that don’t have a definitive answer, like many aspects of CoViD. Some pages with what I would categorize as “inquiring” get removed just because they don’t line up with the WHO. This isn’t about questioning vaccines, but rather the unsettled questions around this new disease. Just gets banned... it’s not like I have a stake in that fight _other_ than dismay at private censorship of opinions that don’t toe a given line. It’s rather frightening. But... many of the same companies will fill your search results or fill affiliate pages with quackery ads just fine...
- thayne 6y ago
  I think that's only half of it. The other half is that it's easier for consumers to find content in the silos of the large corporations than content that exists outside of them.
- 6ak74rfy 6y ago
  I went through exactly this thinking recently when I wanted to setup a blog for myself (and migrate an existing one off of WordPress). I tried my best (and I think I succeeded) in ensuring that I am not locked into one vendor, and it was pretty much free. Someone else mentioned that you can't reach as many people from your silo-ed website as you can if you go through social networks. I found one way you could get best of both worlds - through Medium's import feature[1]. But I don't yet know how effective that is. Here's a short write-up in case anyone's interested: [2] [1]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a-post https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a... [2]: https://ketanvijayvargiya.com/58-setup-blog-and-email-on-custom-domain-for-almost-free/ https://ketanvijayvargiya.com/58-setup-blog-and-email-on-cus...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
r3trohack3r 6y ago
I'd argue this is a feature not a bug. The internet is a protocol for communication, not archival or retention. Any notion of persistence is owned by nodes in the network. Retrieval from an "archive" over the internet comes in the form of communication. The web introduced hypertext, and a protocol for exchanging hypertext, on top of this communication protocol. But again any notion of persistence of hypertext, and the "links" between hypertext documents, is the responsibility of the nodes in the network. They were sharing information with the whole world, but in an ephemeral medium. The web, and internet, is not an inhospitable place for anyone without corporate backing. You can host a somewhat reliable service on a raspberry pi over your home internet connection.
- wolco 6y ago
  You just can't be found. You can self host but unless someone finds you some other way you are excluded.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
colonwqbang 6y ago
Why do you feel that it was the job of "corporations" to preserve and archive of every page forever? In my country, all physical books and magazines which are published must be submitted to the government in X copies. The government then keeps an archive. With webpages, the problem of obtaining X copies never existed. Why couldn't the government have archived webpages like it always did with books?
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  It is not that it is their job. The problem is the mismatch between the broader public understanding of the lifetime of "a webpage" and reality, when said "webpage" is inside a walled silo (and maybe even when it isn't).
  - colonwqbang 6y ago
    I guess I don't see why anyone would expect their webpage to keep being published indefinitely with no contract or ongoing payment. Not many other things in the world work like that. Services provided by a company typically don't survive the end of the contract to provide that service. If the company itself goes bankrupt, all services cease to be provdided immediately. Typically the only organisations which can credibly commit to providing a service for more than a few years/decades is the government of a country, a well-funded foundation with a clearly specified mission, or similar.
- rikroots 6y ago
  In the UK, this job is handled by the British Library. They have a legal duty to collect annual snapshots of all websites using the .uk TLD https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/uk-web-archive https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/uk-web-archive
- metrokoi 6y ago
  I believe you are misrepresenting the situation. No one expects corporations to archive and preserve all data, especially not data that they are not associated with. However, if they create a monopoly on that data they have an obligation to preserve it, especially in the case of a corporation outright aquiring data instead of simply "out competing" for data. And as everyone mentions, of course they are in no way legally obligated to do so, but they are by any reasonable standard ethically obligated. I do think that the government could and should archive data, but there is currently no system in place for doing so and likely will not be for a long time, if ever. Corporations would simply have to maintain the data that they already have.
fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
The issue is is that a web page only lasts as long as its funding does: private sites are great, but someone still has to pay for the server and, when they die, it’s probably going to just vanish, unless the internet archive got it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nullc 6y ago
> It turns out that most pages created in the 90s are now inaccessible Some of that is because search engines have simply stopped returning them in results even though they're still online.
opportune 6y ago
How are big corporations preventing a web server from serving content over HTTP in old-school HTML?
FpUser 6y ago
I seem to have a distrust of corps imprinted in my brain since birth and had never fell for their candies/propaganda. All my stuff is always on my own servers with shadowing of course.

methodin 6y ago

Seems like a fundamental truth of Capitalism: privatization and ultimate destruction of anything that can be monetized. Certain things are impossible without money and to make money to have to generate or consume something which leads to a never-ending cycle.

zrm 6y ago

I don't think it's any harder to create a website than it ever was. The problem seems to be that corporations have made it so easy to do it within their silos that people aren't willing to spend ten hours on something they could do in ten minutes, not realizing that they're going to spend a lot more than ten hours creating content which the company will then vaporize at random whenever they feel like it.

quaintdev 6y ago
A decade ago, there use to be celebrity websites which had forums, galleries, blogs now it's just Instagram. Hell so many prominent celebrities don't even own a domain name in their name. Also, it's not like the content has improved. Earlier their use to be HQ images in those celeb galleries now the highest resolution image is 1200x1200. The only thing that has improved is how easily a celebrity can reach millions everything else has gone downhill with respect to discussions, forums, galleries, blogs. Most of these are replaced by poor comments section. It's not just celebrities, so many independent artists are putting up their talent on Instagram and I don't have access to any of it because I need an Instagram account for that. Instagram web version is forcing to sign up if you scroll 1 page down on a profile. Sometimes I feel like we need to build cutting edge decentralized applications that will burn these walled gardens to the ground. /rant
- r3trohack3r 6y ago
  The only thing that has improved is how easily a celebrity can reach millions From Wikipedia: Celebrity is a reference to the fame and wide public recognition of an individual or a group I'd posit that celebrities are celebrities by connecting with millions. A platform that offers a "celebrity" the ability to connect easily with millions seems to be worth more than a list of any other features.
  - zeckalpha 6y ago
    What has changed is the meaning of the word connected.
- MYEUHD 6y ago
  >I don't have access to any of it because I need an Instagram account for that. Check out https://bibliogram.art https://bibliogram.art
  - JoblessWonder 6y ago
    502 Bad Gateway
    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      Old link. Here ya go https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/ https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/
      - aspenmayer 6y ago
        For what it’s worth, the original link is back up again.
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/ https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/
clusterfish 6y ago
A lot of people, clubs and businesses publish their content on Facebooks and Instagrams because those platforms are better for getting your content out to your followers and more people. They are being rational. Where's the non-proprietory decentralized platform that lets me reach as many people as I can on Facebook? There isn't one. Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way? Facebook is 16 years old. That was a lot of time to figure out an alternative solution, but all we have are experimental projects that rely on adoption that they don't have to be useful. Corporations aren't going to change how they behave, but it's annoying that us techies are apparently incapable of beating them at our own game.
- Avicebron 6y ago
  More often than not, the "game" trends toward market capture and acquire + kill or absorb business strategies. At a certain size that's hard for anyone to beat.
- zrm 6y ago
  > Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way? Newsfeed is RSS/Atom. Identity / friends / followers are really one package, and it isn't a thing browsers can solve on their own, because people want the ability to do password resets etc. Also, decentralized identity is somewhat the opposite of this anyway -- people don't want to use the same "identity" for their parents and their friends and their boss. The best way to do this is for sites to use email as identity, because it's common and gives you password resets, but people can create more than one and separate them as they like. Which the technology to do already exists, but Facebook and Google made it easy and the free software equivalent takes several hours to get running. Which we could fix, but haven't (yet).
  - clusterfish 6y ago
    Sure RSS exists, and I use it, but it's not even built-in to (most) browsers anymore. You open an RSS link in the browser and it spits out XML garbage. Wat. RSS is sadly not enough on its own without the other puzzle pieces. Private feeds are not really a thing, it doesn't let you comment on or like or share the article to your friends, etc.
mc32 6y ago
Yep, it’s even worse. There are some things that don’t have a definitive answer, like many aspects of CoViD. Some pages with what I would categorize as “inquiring” get removed just because they don’t line up with the WHO. This isn’t about questioning vaccines, but rather the unsettled questions around this new disease. Just gets banned... it’s not like I have a stake in that fight _other_ than dismay at private censorship of opinions that don’t toe a given line. It’s rather frightening. But... many of the same companies will fill your search results or fill affiliate pages with quackery ads just fine...
thayne 6y ago
I think that's only half of it. The other half is that it's easier for consumers to find content in the silos of the large corporations than content that exists outside of them.
6ak74rfy 6y ago
I went through exactly this thinking recently when I wanted to setup a blog for myself (and migrate an existing one off of WordPress). I tried my best (and I think I succeeded) in ensuring that I am not locked into one vendor, and it was pretty much free. Someone else mentioned that you can't reach as many people from your silo-ed website as you can if you go through social networks. I found one way you could get best of both worlds - through Medium's import feature[1]. But I don't yet know how effective that is. Here's a short write-up in case anyone's interested: [2] [1]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a-post https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a... [2]: https://ketanvijayvargiya.com/58-setup-blog-and-email-on-custom-domain-for-almost-free/ https://ketanvijayvargiya.com/58-setup-blog-and-email-on-cus...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

r3trohack3r 6y ago

I'd argue this is a feature not a bug. The internet is a protocol for communication, not archival or retention. Any notion of persistence is owned by nodes in the network. Retrieval from an "archive" over the internet comes in the form of communication. The web introduced hypertext, and a protocol for exchanging hypertext, on top of this communication protocol. But again any notion of persistence of hypertext, and the "links" between hypertext documents, is the responsibility of the nodes in the network. They were sharing information with the whole world, but in an ephemeral medium. The web, and internet, is not an inhospitable place for anyone without corporate backing. You can host a somewhat reliable service on a raspberry pi over your home internet connection.

wolco 6y ago
You just can't be found. You can self host but unless someone finds you some other way you are excluded.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

colonwqbang 6y ago

Why do you feel that it was the job of "corporations" to preserve and archive of every page forever? In my country, all physical books and magazines which are published must be submitted to the government in X copies. The government then keeps an archive. With webpages, the problem of obtaining X copies never existed. Why couldn't the government have archived webpages like it always did with books?

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
It is not that it is their job. The problem is the mismatch between the broader public understanding of the lifetime of "a webpage" and reality, when said "webpage" is inside a walled silo (and maybe even when it isn't).
- colonwqbang 6y ago
  I guess I don't see why anyone would expect their webpage to keep being published indefinitely with no contract or ongoing payment. Not many other things in the world work like that. Services provided by a company typically don't survive the end of the contract to provide that service. If the company itself goes bankrupt, all services cease to be provdided immediately. Typically the only organisations which can credibly commit to providing a service for more than a few years/decades is the government of a country, a well-funded foundation with a clearly specified mission, or similar.
rikroots 6y ago
In the UK, this job is handled by the British Library. They have a legal duty to collect annual snapshots of all websites using the .uk TLD https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/uk-web-archive https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/uk-web-archive
metrokoi 6y ago
I believe you are misrepresenting the situation. No one expects corporations to archive and preserve all data, especially not data that they are not associated with. However, if they create a monopoly on that data they have an obligation to preserve it, especially in the case of a corporation outright aquiring data instead of simply "out competing" for data. And as everyone mentions, of course they are in no way legally obligated to do so, but they are by any reasonable standard ethically obligated. I do think that the government could and should archive data, but there is currently no system in place for doing so and likely will not be for a long time, if ever. Corporations would simply have to maintain the data that they already have.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago

The issue is is that a web page only lasts as long as its funding does: private sites are great, but someone still has to pay for the server and, when they die, it’s probably going to just vanish, unless the internet archive got it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nullc 6y ago

> It turns out that most pages created in the 90s are now inaccessible Some of that is because search engines have simply stopped returning them in results even though they're still online.

opportune 6y ago

How are big corporations preventing a web server from serving content over HTTP in old-school HTML?

FpUser 6y ago

I seem to have a distrust of corps imprinted in my brain since birth and had never fell for their candies/propaganda. All my stuff is always on my own servers with shadowing of course.