5 ms·

Admittedly, I miss the “old internet” too, however I have hope we can build it again. As I see it, there are two main issues to solve: 1) It’s no longer trivi

Admittedly, I miss the “old internet” too, however I have hope we can build it again. As I see it, there are two main issues to solve: 1) It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision? 2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry. Parallel to this shift, people have moved to podcasts, news articles and videos for their daily content. The group of people that consume text is no longer the majority. In many ways, each new social media platform is attempting to recapture an aspect of community/shared experience that has been achieved before. The good platforms extend this reach, the bad suffocate it. A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech.

okamiueru 5y ago
Regarding 1. When you say "no longer trivial", I would point out that if it isn't now, then it surely never was? Not using a framework (by which I assume you mean the likes of wordpress or squarespace) is still as much possible today as it ever was. And, the knowledge on how to do so is ever more accessible. I can see your point that when provided with easy ways to do things, you are limited to design decisions and choices of those frameworks. However, I think the progress of open source has lowered the bar significantly for creating a completely custom platform.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  I had a friend with zero programming experience who put up a simple webpage for her small business in 1995 with just a text editor and some photos. Yes, it was much simpler. And it was encouraged, because most ISPs offered free web page hosting - including a free URL, and email - with an access account. Wordpress is a nightmare in comparison. And a fully engineered blog stack is far beyond the reach of most users. You could argue that the modern equivalent is a Facebook page, but of course web pages were fully public. You were in a public space, under your own name, limited only by your willingness to learn some very basic HTML. It's a completely different experience to being in a privatised space with its own content management tools, which you only have very limited user level access to.
  - okamiueru 5y ago
    Isn't the anecdote only valid if your friend would somehow be unable to do the same if it were today? I do get the sentiment that is expressed, but I also think it is wrong. The possibility to create, and the resources with which to do so is astronomically better than it was growing up. Imagine having access to YouTube and the thousands of excellent tutors. Just because convenience can lead to mediocrity, doesn't excuse it.
donatj 5y ago
I agree entirely with your second point. I feel like a lot of the creative energy that had gone into the old web now goes into YouTube and TikTok, for better or worse.
mopsi 5y ago
> It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision? 1. Sign up to $5/mo virtual hosting service and choose a domain name. 2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress". 3. Open Wordpress. 4. Write and publish whatever you want, structured however you want. This is much-much easier than working with Frontpage or Dreamweaver was in the olden days. Connecting to a server via FTP alone was a huge hurdle. Now it's all WYSIWYG in a browser. Obstacles to self-hosted personal websites are smaller than ever before, but the corpo web has turned everyone from homeowners into hotel guests who have to follow their house rules. It's a cultural problem, not a technical one.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > 1. Sign up to $5/mo You already lost most people here. > virtual hosting service and choose a domain name. Actually, people don't even have to have a domain name for their webpage. But ignoring that - how will people know that this is what they need to do? "I want to create a homepage, I don't know what 'virtual hosting' is. I don't know why I need to be looking for 'services'." > 2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress". In their what now click what now? How are you so sure this is always possible? Also, what about search engines (cough-Google-cough) under-ranking individual pages in favor of larger, corporate-favored sites?
  - sseagull 5y ago
    > how will people know that this is what they need to do? Why has the tech community at large completely failed to educate people on the basics of something used by billions of people daily and affecting increasingly-important parts of their lives? Is it because we keep infantilizing them the way you seem to be doing, pretending they are too stupid to learn anything new? Or is it because in an effort to simplify, everyone simplifies to a different way, resulting in even more complexity? Or is it because tech really doesn't care and sucks at explaining anything? A bit of all three (and probably more) if you ask me
- 5y ago
squiggleblaz 5y ago
> 1) It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision? In the olden days, you were either affiliated with a university or you signed up to Geocities. Nowadays, you can go to WordPress and add your fill of content pages: it's not just a blog. I'm pretty sure the modern web is a win for ease of access to genuine user-controlled pages. Probably you had more control over the skin of a GeoCities site than a free WordPress page, but I'm not sure to what extent or how important that is. I think the issue here is more that people don't just want to make content - they want to have readers. You're more likely to get and know about your readers if you post on Facebook or Twitter than if you post on WordPress. > 2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry. I think this is important. The modern web doesn't provide discoverability to independent content produced in good faith. Either you have to agree to donate it to Facebook or you need to do a lot of work drumming it up. Google become popular because it cared more about the content than the primitive SEO, and the web was small enough you could plausibly use dmoz.org to browse the internet. Now, advanced SEO is better than any search engine algorithm and there's too much godawful content to be excited to read content without some kind of active recommendation. > A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech. I recall another article posted here a few weeks ago, where the author argued that centralisation dominates over decentralisation. But the argument in this place (at least till I went to bed) was that because there was technical decentralisation, there was no centralisation. I don't know which view represents the mainstream view of technical people today, just which view seemed to have the most advocates while I was reading the thread. What I do know is that it seems hopeless to me to hope that our best and brightest will help decentralise the internet again. I think the Gemini project has it right when they do whatever they can. I wish it were more prosocial though; it mostly consists of isolated gemlogs without the opportunity to reply. (I mean, you can reply, but all you're doing is posting a new page. If the person to whom you are replying doesn't know you from a loaf of bread, it's more practical to just go wash the dishes. If someone wants to correct me, by all means: I'm all ears.) Btw, I don't want to imply that the Gemini folk aren't the best and brightest: Just that the path to a decentralised internet is the same as the path to free software - wearing the straitjacket and doing the work. And even then, it's easily lost. How much centralised, non-free software do we all use even if we've never installed it! I think the main problem to solve is interaction without inauthentic action (spam). Centralised systems allow one person to cut off the spammer once, and that stops them from affecting everyone. If you imagine a decentralised gem/weblogging network with a reply facility, then if you write a logpost (on a log hosted on your own computer) and send a trackback to mine (on a log hosted on my own computer), then I probably consider that interesting. But if now a spammer writes a logpost and sends a trackback to yours, you need a way to cancel that. And once you've cancelled them, they can still post to mine! Each spammer will annoy each logposter as many times as they can get around the spam protection: it's an exponential problem. With a centralised system, once you've cancelled them, they are much more likely to encounter difficulty trying to trackback to my log: it's a linear problem - or even less. The other issues are probably surmountable - it shouldn't be impossible to create a decentralised network of posts and replies and threads that can be viewed together. It probably starts with something more like RSS than Usenet.
superkuh 5y ago
Most of this is because the people you are talking about don't actually use a computer to access the internet. They use a mobile computer. Mobile computers don't have the networking or energy storage (due to radio usage) capabilities to be able to participate in the internet as an equal. They almost all don't have a routable ipv4 and for those ones that do have ipv6, often it doesn't come with control over ports. If these people were accessing the internet from a home computer they could just install a simple static webserver and put HTML files, jpegs, gifs, etc in a folder, forward ports on their router, and bam, they're on the web.

okamiueru 5y ago

Regarding 1. When you say "no longer trivial", I would point out that if it isn't now, then it surely never was? Not using a framework (by which I assume you mean the likes of wordpress or squarespace) is still as much possible today as it ever was. And, the knowledge on how to do so is ever more accessible. I can see your point that when provided with easy ways to do things, you are limited to design decisions and choices of those frameworks. However, I think the progress of open source has lowered the bar significantly for creating a completely custom platform.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
I had a friend with zero programming experience who put up a simple webpage for her small business in 1995 with just a text editor and some photos. Yes, it was much simpler. And it was encouraged, because most ISPs offered free web page hosting - including a free URL, and email - with an access account. Wordpress is a nightmare in comparison. And a fully engineered blog stack is far beyond the reach of most users. You could argue that the modern equivalent is a Facebook page, but of course web pages were fully public. You were in a public space, under your own name, limited only by your willingness to learn some very basic HTML. It's a completely different experience to being in a privatised space with its own content management tools, which you only have very limited user level access to.
- okamiueru 5y ago
  Isn't the anecdote only valid if your friend would somehow be unable to do the same if it were today? I do get the sentiment that is expressed, but I also think it is wrong. The possibility to create, and the resources with which to do so is astronomically better than it was growing up. Imagine having access to YouTube and the thousands of excellent tutors. Just because convenience can lead to mediocrity, doesn't excuse it.

donatj 5y ago

I agree entirely with your second point. I feel like a lot of the creative energy that had gone into the old web now goes into YouTube and TikTok, for better or worse.

mopsi 5y ago

> It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision? 1. Sign up to $5/mo virtual hosting service and choose a domain name. 2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress". 3. Open Wordpress. 4. Write and publish whatever you want, structured however you want. This is much-much easier than working with Frontpage or Dreamweaver was in the olden days. Connecting to a server via FTP alone was a huge hurdle. Now it's all WYSIWYG in a browser. Obstacles to self-hosted personal websites are smaller than ever before, but the corpo web has turned everyone from homeowners into hotel guests who have to follow their house rules. It's a cultural problem, not a technical one.

einpoklum 5y ago
> 1. Sign up to $5/mo You already lost most people here. > virtual hosting service and choose a domain name. Actually, people don't even have to have a domain name for their webpage. But ignoring that - how will people know that this is what they need to do? "I want to create a homepage, I don't know what 'virtual hosting' is. I don't know why I need to be looking for 'services'." > 2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress". In their what now click what now? How are you so sure this is always possible? Also, what about search engines (cough-Google-cough) under-ranking individual pages in favor of larger, corporate-favored sites?
- sseagull 5y ago
  > how will people know that this is what they need to do? Why has the tech community at large completely failed to educate people on the basics of something used by billions of people daily and affecting increasingly-important parts of their lives? Is it because we keep infantilizing them the way you seem to be doing, pretending they are too stupid to learn anything new? Or is it because in an effort to simplify, everyone simplifies to a different way, resulting in even more complexity? Or is it because tech really doesn't care and sucks at explaining anything? A bit of all three (and probably more) if you ask me
5y ago

squiggleblaz 5y ago

> 1) It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision? In the olden days, you were either affiliated with a university or you signed up to Geocities. Nowadays, you can go to WordPress and add your fill of content pages: it's not just a blog. I'm pretty sure the modern web is a win for ease of access to genuine user-controlled pages. Probably you had more control over the skin of a GeoCities site than a free WordPress page, but I'm not sure to what extent or how important that is. I think the issue here is more that people don't just want to make content - they want to have readers. You're more likely to get and know about your readers if you post on Facebook or Twitter than if you post on WordPress. > 2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry. I think this is important. The modern web doesn't provide discoverability to independent content produced in good faith. Either you have to agree to donate it to Facebook or you need to do a lot of work drumming it up. Google become popular because it cared more about the content than the primitive SEO, and the web was small enough you could plausibly use dmoz.org to browse the internet. Now, advanced SEO is better than any search engine algorithm and there's too much godawful content to be excited to read content without some kind of active recommendation. > A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech. I recall another article posted here a few weeks ago, where the author argued that centralisation dominates over decentralisation. But the argument in this place (at least till I went to bed) was that because there was technical decentralisation, there was no centralisation. I don't know which view represents the mainstream view of technical people today, just which view seemed to have the most advocates while I was reading the thread. What I do know is that it seems hopeless to me to hope that our best and brightest will help decentralise the internet again. I think the Gemini project has it right when they do whatever they can. I wish it were more prosocial though; it mostly consists of isolated gemlogs without the opportunity to reply. (I mean, you can reply, but all you're doing is posting a new page. If the person to whom you are replying doesn't know you from a loaf of bread, it's more practical to just go wash the dishes. If someone wants to correct me, by all means: I'm all ears.) Btw, I don't want to imply that the Gemini folk aren't the best and brightest: Just that the path to a decentralised internet is the same as the path to free software - wearing the straitjacket and doing the work. And even then, it's easily lost. How much centralised, non-free software do we all use even if we've never installed it! I think the main problem to solve is interaction without inauthentic action (spam). Centralised systems allow one person to cut off the spammer once, and that stops them from affecting everyone. If you imagine a decentralised gem/weblogging network with a reply facility, then if you write a logpost (on a log hosted on your own computer) and send a trackback to mine (on a log hosted on my own computer), then I probably consider that interesting. But if now a spammer writes a logpost and sends a trackback to yours, you need a way to cancel that. And once you've cancelled them, they can still post to mine! Each spammer will annoy each logposter as many times as they can get around the spam protection: it's an exponential problem. With a centralised system, once you've cancelled them, they are much more likely to encounter difficulty trying to trackback to my log: it's a linear problem - or even less. The other issues are probably surmountable - it shouldn't be impossible to create a decentralised network of posts and replies and threads that can be viewed together. It probably starts with something more like RSS than Usenet.

superkuh 5y ago

Most of this is because the people you are talking about don't actually use a computer to access the internet. They use a mobile computer. Mobile computers don't have the networking or energy storage (due to radio usage) capabilities to be able to participate in the internet as an equal. They almost all don't have a routable ipv4 and for those ones that do have ipv6, often it doesn't come with control over ports. If these people were accessing the internet from a home computer they could just install a simple static webserver and put HTML files, jpegs, gifs, etc in a folder, forward ports on their router, and bam, they're on the web.