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> This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :( The internet is fine. The highly centralized businesses that built themselves on the technology are mee
by akira2501 3y ago
> This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :(
The internet is fine. The highly centralized businesses that built themselves on the technology are meeting their inevitable end.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoIf anything, nature is healing. I’ve noticed at least 1 community return to forums due to all of this (https://mholdschool.com/ https://mholdschool.com/), and while unfortunately AFAIK there isn’t any good FLOSS software for it, it’s certainly a start.
- goldenkey 3y agoWhat happened to vBulletin by Jelsoft? Needs to be open sourced.
- Jenk 3y agohttps://www.vbulletin.com/ https://www.vbulletin.com/
- rafark 3y agoPeople use xenforo now, which was created by some former developers of vbulletin so it’s very similar.
- goldenkey 3y agoWill have to check it out, thanks!
- fatfox 3y agoWoltlab are still around as well. IIRC Burning Board was vBulletin’s fiercest competitor at the time
- gbear605 3y agoPhpBB is GPLv2, and it still works just fine. Discourse is also GPL, if you’re looking for a more modern look. There are a number of others too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_s...)
- rodolphoarruda 3y agoThe UI looks the same after all those 20 years.
- gaius_baltar 3y agoAnd this is a feature!
- agent281 3y agoLiterally feel waves of nostalgia looking at that layout. It's perfect!
- ekianjo 3y agoWhich means it works?
- rodolphoarruda 3y agoGood question. It seems to be a half empty/full glass situation.
- leereeves 3y agoDoes PhpBB have an adaptive layout? I've used several older forums that require scrolling sideways because they don't.
- qup 3y agohttps://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2546121 https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2546121
- zappchance 3y agoThere's Discourse[0] [0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse
- greggh 3y agoFlarum, https://flarum.org https://flarum.org
- animesh 3y agoZig community at reddit was closed recently and they decided to make its discourse instance as the primary discussion center. https://ziggit.dev/ https://ziggit.dev/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- brabel 3y agoDiscourse is going to pull the same shenanigans as Reddit and Twitter, you can be sure of that. No one is going to host millions of users for free, forever, they'll all come around to get their investment back one day.
- proto_lambda 3y agoWhat? Discourse is free software, they aren't "hosting millions of users" at all, nevemind for free.
- brabel 3y agoSomeone is going to have to host users.
- proto_lambda 3y agoYes, the respective projects themselves. If you can't trust a project not to fuck over its users, why are you so concerned about the hosting of their discussion platform in particular, rather than just about everything else?
- chienandalou 3y agoAre you thinking of Discord? https://discord.com https://discord.com vs https://www.discourse.org https://www.discourse.org
- udev4096 3y agoThink before you speak. Discourse is a self-hostable solution
- Roark66 3y agoBingo! It's only a matter of time another service takes over. I would be extremely surprised if at any given time there wasn't at least two startups in the dark trying to be the next twitter. Just waiting for the right moment for a large group of people to get pissed off at twitter to launch their service to the public.
- jasonmp85 3y agoTo not know of any is sort of weird. To believe a for-profit enterprise should replace the last is unspeakably dumb.
- 7e 3y agoWhy are centralized businesses doomed to fail? It’s been the primary organizational mode for the last 10,000 years.
- grugagag 3y agoPressure to squeeze out profits continously until there’s nothing but a husk left.
- mr_00ff00 3y agoExcept weren’t all these services running at a loss? How would smaller companies do better?
- rglullis 3y agoBy actually charging for their services? For every gmail, how many independent email providers do you think exist out there?
- mr_00ff00 3y agoRight but isn’t that what they are claiming would drive people away from the big companies? Why would you choose to not pay for the big tech products and then pay for a smaller version?
- rglullis 3y agoBecause Big Tech demands big profits. They can not exist in worlds where they can not have a monopoly or oligopoly. Smaller companies and ISVs, on the other hand, will be better off if their market is commoditized. They won't have to spend so much to compete in R&D, they just need to find each the best way to serve their (comparatively) small customer base.
- keldtin 3y agoThe key here is that the environment of near-zero interest rates these services proliferated in is over, so there is a drive to wall up and monetize their content more aggressively. That will probably fail, because all value they had was in community interaction. Who would want to train an LLM on post-2023 twitter content?
- Jenk 3y ago> This killed nitter. I suspect that was the intent.
- jonathankoren 3y agoYeah. Honestly, at this point you have to think the ketamine isn’t being microdosed[0], or the whole Twitter escapade is an intentional op to burn down an account independent forum that has frequently been a source of pain for those in power. I suspect the later. We’ve seen billionaires do it countless times. [0] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/elon-musk-ketamine-depression-microdose-b2365648.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
- labster 3y agoMan, you don’t need the special K to see that Elon is not great at non-engineering things.
- wombatpm 3y agoAn admitted Aspie not getting SOCIAL media. Color my surprised.
- halostatue 3y agoElon is not great at engineering things, either. The main thing that he’s great at is self promotion and convincing people that they should give him (even more) money.
- photonerd 3y agoLikely more of a bonus. I doubt anyone at Twitter factored nitter into any business decisions.
- lucb1e 3y agoNah, how many people are using Twitter without being logged in compared to how many people legitimately change every link they receive to Nitter? I used the 'redirect to nitter' Firefox extension and Android app but it got quite unreliable and nobody else that I know uses nitter at all. I think Nitter users would be a tiny, perhaps even immeasurable minority compared to casual readers that now are incentivized to either log in or fuck off (but... FOMO).
- calebcannon 3y agoThe internet is most definitely not fine. There is an incoming tsunami of chat gpt generated bullshit that is going to make most open discussion sites more or less useless. Twitter requiring accounts and Reddit shutting down apis are both related: chat gpt et al are a threat to the social media business and ironically made possible because of the social media business. TBF I think we should all be exercising extreme (even more than usual) skepticism on any discussion sites any more.
- hext 3y agoRight, if you aren’t already doing this, you’re about to have to screen every single comment online in a fucked up game of ‘human or robot’
- XorNot 3y agoI mean this has been true for a while: we've all laboured under the fiction that any given screen name maps 1:1 with a human being. On every large platform, this hasn't been the majority for a long time.
- KronisLV 3y ago> Right, if you aren’t already doing this, you’re about to have to screen every single comment online in a fucked up game of ‘human or robot’ Hah, this might mean that we'd be one step closer to the dead internet (conspiracy) theory actually being reality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory What an interesting concept.
- mattbrewsbytes 3y agoSocial media companies are acting like a drug user who was getting their dope for free but now has to turn tricks behind the dumpster. Easy money (aka low loan rates) has dried up or much harder to justify so companies that have used their user population as a means to profit are realizing they need to charge money for things like blue check marks or API usage when all the VC's won't give them a hit anymore. Publicly free content from users devolves to garbage content. I think the Chat GPT effect is they're realizing its easier for companies/entities to generate garbage that is at or exceeding the intelligence of comments by actual people (a low bar). Sure there are pockets of usefulness but this is tiny amongst the firehose of garbage. If all that is publicly available on social platforms is just garbage nonsense, people will just stop going if any barrier is thrown in front of them. The internet as a technology stack is fine. This is how social media dies (hopefully).
- MisterBastahrd 3y agoWait until you realize that highly centralized businesses are a feature, not a bug. We've BEEN through federated platforms before. We've even been through PROTOCOLS before. They're all horrible. The successor to any platform that currently exists will have slight improvements to what already exists, and that's IF they're able to do so. I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do have over 30 years of being around social media platforms on the internet.
- thowawatp302 3y agoEvery time someone says this they forget the internet itself is a federated platform.
- MisterBastahrd 3y agoEvery time someone says this it's because they don't have a credible counterargument to the central premise.