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We need to rewild the internet
- Jfnro49 3y ago[flagged]
- urda 3y agoMore people should be tending their "digital gardens" just to have something to curate and share. Bring back the weird, the odd, the deep-dives into topics you never imagined having such detail, bring back the strange animated GIFS, the websites always "under construction", give me your weird, give me your odd, this should be everyone's place to be free.
- 082349872349872 3y agoI feel like letting my geek flag fly / Yes, I feel like I owe it to someone __________ ____\ / | __ _| / | | |\ \ | _____\ |________\ | | |
- aidenn0 3y agoAlmost uninstalled Linux / It happened just the other day
- dhosek 3y agoPoints for the CSNY deep cut reference.
- fsckboy 3y agofor CSNY "Almost Cut my Hair", 1970? may I please have points, too sir? Jimi Hendrix "If 6 was 9", 1967: "If all the hippies cut off all their hair I don't care, I don't care... White collar Windows users, flashin down the street pointing their plastic finger at me, hoping soon my kind will drop and die: I'm gonna wave my freak flag high!"
- aidenn0 3y agoYou get points from me because that's a clear reference I missed despite having heard both songs.
- aidenn0 3y agoJust picked up on what GP did first. I'm one of those weird people who listen to albums more than singles, so I don't always know what's a deep-cut. Deja Vu is in regular rotation for me. Country Girl is the only track I'm tempted to skip on that whole album.
- notaustinpowers 3y agoI was just thinking today that I should just start posting my stuff on a personal site. Photos, blogs, life updates, etc. It gives me that control that I want, and I don't have to worry about Meta, etc trying to monetize it. Plus I get to unplug from those "n liked your post" dopamine hits.
- digging 3y agoI don't really share anything I make/do on the internet but I've found posting my photography on a personal site feels pretty good even if I don't expect anyone to ever see it there. Recently I made a /now page and even started blogging infrequently - again, there are likely 0 viewers, but there's some pride in knowing I've staked out a corner of the internet for myself.
- ozim 3y agoI think everyone is done with influencers. People would like to find genuine ones instead of just cash grabs.
- verzali 3y agoPeople, especially the younger generations, are already too cynical. A lot of them don't seem to believe anyone does anything on the Internet except to make money. I find that profundly depressing.
- fennecbutt 3y agoI think that's wrong. Loads of my mates are 18-24 and many don't realise how basically all the "Hey look at this cool useless cheap crap" vids are all just ads. They even buy that crap, was no signal to think about it without being reminded to think about it.
- criddell 3y agoI've thought about building personal site, but the opportunity cost is just too high. The time I spend making a site has to come from somewhere and there just isn't anything I do that I want to take time from.
- autokad 3y agoI remember when they were on the agenda path to eliminate gifs. You'd see posts on hacker news written by Giffy, a company seeking to make its existence justified by getting rid of gifs, all over hacker news. When I would say: This is a terrible idea, they just want to control and own the content. a gif you own, a gif you can download and so what ever you wanted, etc. boy was I down voted into oblivion. One of the reasons for this is many posts aren't on hacker news by accident, they are hidden advertisements. Chances are, you got the karma to downvote people. Just starting off at -1 is a disadvantage. You can try it too: just disagree with what an article says in the comments, 99% of the time you will be downvoted. Agree and you get free karma. This is not always the case, but generally is.
- gentleman11 3y agoIt’s the opposite. Being contrarian is free karma, generally. The downvotes come from picking unpopular positions, whether you’re wright or wrong. I used to get downvoted a lot when talking to people about privacy, but now those sorts of posts get upvotes. Times and prevailing opinions change
- ants_everywhere 3y ago> One of the reasons for this is many posts aren't on hacker news by accident, they are hidden advertisements. obligatory https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- crooked-v 3y agoThat stuff is still around, it's just on Discord and VRChat now.
- FroshKiller 3y agoThen it isn't around. It's walled off. And it will disappear.
- Almondsetat 3y agoDo you spend your life reading 20yo blog posts? Just live the moment with the opportunities it gives you
- dhosek 3y agoSometimes. I stumbled across somebody’s 20+-year-old collection of deep musical analyses of early Chicago songs. That same material on Twitter/Facebook/Discord/whatever is going to be inaccessible.
- mauvehaus 3y agoI'd be interested in a link. Live At Carnegie Hall was my paper-writing music in college. I discovered later that I don't much care for it when I don't have anything else occupying my mind. I'm unsure if it's because there isn't really that much to the songs of if I'm missing some nuance and complexity that makes them worth another listen.
- jallmann 3y agoMy Twitter feed has a bunch of people doing extremely niche deep dives into Cold War weapons systems. For example, on the design of MiG-23 air intakes: https://twitter.com/BaA43A3aHY/status/1753715489686057384 https://twitter.com/BaA43A3aHY/status/1753715489686057384
- jozzas 3y agoThis is literally the point of the article. That's all posted inside the twitter walled garden. Great content, wrong platform.
- idle_zealot 3y agoRSS handles syndication, but how would their deep-dives be discoverable if they had been posted to personal blog sites? That's a missing piece of the puzzle for the distributed web; curation and recommendation are ad-hoc and don't scale.
- RGamma 3y agoThey'd be discoverable by search or linking. The distributed web is compatible with feeds. It's what's happening on this site too. Except the content would be packaged and redistributable and wouldn't disappear when the original service goes down or such.
- kevinsync 3y agoSure, but (gen-pop) search itself has been degraded / hijacked beyond recognition compared to two decades ago, and walled gardens heavily discourage linking. Factor in that most people access internet from devices designed to consume in very specific ways from a controlled list of sources and we may as well be lamenting that nobody's finding the one physical copy of your book that's sitting on a shelf in a brick and mortar library in Omaha. It feels like a chicken and egg problem to me -- realistically you need to meet people where they're at and appeal to the current channels' algorithms to get your content discovered, but in doing so you also reinforce the strength of the walled garden itself and participate in the diminishment of both search and the "wild" internet at large.
- properbrew 3y agoIf you haven't checked out the "Surpise me" button on https://wiby.me https://wiby.me I strongly suggest you do. These digital gardens are still out there even if sadly stuck in time.
- lancesells 3y agoI've used that button so many times to find things. I wish there was another directory that had the same unique feel but a bit more modernized. Wiby seems to be only one era or feel.
- jmholla 3y agoI like Marginalia: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
- marginalia_nu 3y agoI got some quality issues right now. Kinda works but not as well as I'd want.
- Filligree 3y agoIt's gotten famous enough that people have started optimizing for it?
- marginalia_nu 3y agoNah, just been working on low level stuff and I haven't had the time to do a lot of the manual quality tuning that's always been necessary once in a blue moon. Downside of being a one man show is I only have so much attention to spend on tasks, so sometimes quality tuning gets a bit neglected.
- ya1sec 3y agoGonna plug my project: https://moonjump.app/ https://moonjump.app/ I have a keyboard shortcut that opens moonjump.app/jump, which will redirect to a random site
- m-i-l 3y agoAs much as I like "digital gardens" and think that they are a step in the right direction, rewilding requires much more than cultivating lots of isolated patches of ground - the article even mentions a nature reserve which was "too small and too disconnected to be rewilded. Its effectively landlocked status made over-grazing and collapse inevitable".
- Vrondi 3y ago...these things still exist. They are not surfaced by search engines, because they are too small, and no companies are paying the search engines to do so. Most people stay inside their social network bubbles and never look at regular websites outside them.
- solarpunk 3y agomy friend has a thing that really fits the vibe of "digital gardens" well: https://greenhouse.server.garden/ https://greenhouse.server.garden/
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- Repulsion9513 3y agoYou know what, I'm gonna go find an "under construction" animated gif to add to my website now. Thank you.
- jskelly 3y agoHere you go: http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/ http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/
- winternett 3y agoI have been doing so for a long time, but man, hosting costs are rising, and they really don't give me much storage to host community functionality at all. :| http://www.ruffandtuffrecordings.com/ http://www.ruffandtuffrecordings.com/
- nicbou 3y agoConsider caching to reduce hosting costs. If you are patient, consider static site generators. The latter made running a website so much simpler. There is virtually no maintenance left to do.
- AbstractH24 3y agoLast weekend I had a long discussion about bringing back weird in my daily life here in NYC Seeing this now makes me wonder if it’s more to do with life in general.
- xnx 3y agoTikTok is where the weird/folk Internet is now.
- arromatic 3y agoCan you elaborate more ? I don't use tiktok so i don't have much idea.
- xnx 3y agoTikTok is probably the easiest way for any average person to put content on the internet. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are still more intimidating than "point phone and hit record". Because it is so easy to put something on TikTok more people than every are posting things to the world (not just to friend/family groups) than ever. The content I comes from people who range in age from teenage to retiree, from every country, profession, and economic group. TikTok also has a discovery mechanism that gives every video a chance to get at least some views. I've seen videos that only have a dozen likes of a clutch of 5 robin eggs growing up and flying out of the next, videos on how to start a diesel locomotive, and marketing videos from a Chinese factory where "Roger" promotes his LED signs using English spoken in different American regional accents. My favorite videos recently are from "deeptok" (which, ironically, has gone pretty mainstream) of supremely obtuse, absurdist, random stuff like mulch wizard: https://www.tiktok.com/@patrick.lllll/video/7358144823108373803 https://www.tiktok.com/@patrick.lllll/video/7358144823108373...
- arromatic 3y agoSeems interesting but seems like tiktok dosen't like me. I clicked the link and all i got was some terrible hyper localized content youtube won't even recommend . But it's good to see newcomers to get chance . The search seems awful i search some stuff in english and it showed me unrelated content. How is it dethroning youtube ?
- balder1991 3y agoSearch on TikTok is really not good. The only way is letting the algorithm do its thing and soon it’ll show you content that interests you (which is content you liked or spent more time watching etc.). It has no interest in offering you exactly what you want, it wants to maximize your time “hoping” the next video will be very good, which eventually happens (if you sunk enough time).
- m463 3y agoI think it's getting harder to "be your own person" digitally. For example, host your own mail. Do people host their own webservers anymore? (is a VPS is good enough?) IRC? muds? The rise of smartphones made "computing" accessible to everyone, but people can't actually compute. Computers used to come with a language. You could write your own programs and run them from the getgo. You didn't have to ask permission to digitally sign your own program and run it.
- Repulsion9513 3y ago> For example, host your own mail. Ugh, yeah, good luck on this one. You can get by quite well using one of the major providers as an (outbound-only, if desired) gateway though. > Do people host their own webservers anymore? (is a VPS is good enough?) Yes and yes but mostly it's Docker hell > IRC? muds? They're both still around, albeit a shadow of their former selves. IRC is better than ever, use a client like The Lounge and it's basically(*) a modern chat app. (* Okay, stuff like multi-line and message editing are still effectively missing, but you get embeds and whatnot)
- mrd3v0 3y agoNo, we don't. The issue was never and will never be the content, it is with the curation and mobility deeply and systemically taken over by social media and smart phone makers. If Google displays spam and AI generated nonsense, and almost everyone relies on it (including those who use "alternative front-ends"), then how do you expect anyone to find a healthy internet? Even if the "extractive and fragile monoculture" made up 0.001% of the internet, it doesn't matter if people can never reach the 99.999%.
- digging 3y agoThat's what the article is addressing.
- kristopolous 3y agoThere's lots of these projects already, such as https://neocities.org/browse https://neocities.org/browse And even people with weird myspace style social networking sites like https://spacehey.com/browse https://spacehey.com/browse Then there's telegram and discord, full of all kinds of strange stuff. They're just not mainstream. Probably better that way.
- rumdz 3y agoI was just about to post neocities, but then got distracted by all the cool sites.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- quartesixte 3y ago>Then there's telegram and discord, full of all kinds of strange stuff I was just about to say this. The new pockets of internet communities are filled with interesting and fun things again. It’s just that a lot of them are for and run by teenagers. As adults, we either feel immediately out of place or just get banned outright. The ones run by adults are incredibly niche focusing on “non-mainstream” interests. Discovery is a little harder, yes. And it feels more ephemeral than the static sites of yore. But they’re out there. And they thrive. And 4chan still exists. The kids will be alright.
- kristopolous 3y agoyeah, click around the spacehey site. It's a bunch of kids 13-18 or so. I had initially thought this site was going to be mostly nostalgic people in their 30s and 40s.* It's fascinating how people born after the decline of myspace has found a clone and helped bring it to life. --- * maybe it is and a bunch of people are just playing a character ... unlikely though.
- katehikes88 3y agosad thing is that you need to provide a phone number just to read those telegram and discord groups. 4chan is nothing like it used to be. it is run over by bot posts and shills from various interest groups. the amount of genuine anon posts is quite low.
- juancn 3y agoIt reads like something a GPT model would write, they go all over the place. I also wonder what would their point of view be if the internet truly was wilder, like 4chan or everything behind TOR. On one hand, I kind of like the idea of spreading and atomizing the internet to the masses, a bit like it was at the beginning, but at the beginning the people that were part of the internet were a particularly well educated elite. It was definitely not for everyone. Not everyone was online, what we had was people with disposable income to have a computer, usually with some form of college education and some technical knowledge. Then the masses came, and social media thrived.
- digging 3y ago> It reads like something a GPT model would write, they go all over the place. It's nothing like GPT IMO; it's opinionated, for one thing. I think it's just hard to follow because it does draw from a large variety of sources and ideas and doesn't weave them together very smoothly. This is showcased with the horrible modern trend of displaying a large quote of something the article literally just said, or will say next. This practice is always a bad choice, but failure scales with the complexity of the article; the author would have done better to use more headings, which would help them organize the work. I do completely agree with your assessment of why the earlier internet was... a more rewarding experience. (I don't think "better" is a meaningful term here.) But, the article is explicitly rejecting the idea of returning to the past, and instead building something new that fosters emergent behavior and diversity. The goal is empowerment of agents who have a will to cultivate their ideas.
- sapphicsnail 3y agoWilder doesn't necessarily equal more anonymous. I spend a lot of time on little forums where I might not know someone's irl name but I know who they are.
- kombookcha 3y agoOne of the great losses that came with the end of the forum era was all these little communities with distinct cultures and regulars that you got to know. I kind of found a similar vibe in some discord servers, but they're much more difficult to join as a new user than a forum because old information isn't easily searchable and discussions aren't as longform as old forum posts were.
- helpfulContrib 3y agoIt is surprisingly easy to set up a phpBB forum or some such thing, on a tiny VM tucked into some obscure pool, set up a nameserver for it, invite a couple of your friends, and start your own community, completely disengaged from any major corporate shenanigans. Big things can happen with such a virtual machine. Even better, you could a mailman server, and get yourself a proper mailing-list of like-minded subscribers - for any subject under the sun - chatting away on a regular basis. Fact is, all it takes to set up a decent social network is to do some social engineering. Even real, meat-space activities can be completely divulged of their toxic mainstream membership in the info-spectacle industrial complex, and replaced with a couple smart services, on a tightly bound VM, somewhere functional. Big things happen because of the people, not the technology involved...
- sourcepluck 3y agoSounds very cool, I am interested in hearing more. I'm not sure how well I follow how one could set this up, basically. What constitutes a "tiny VM tucked into some obscure pool", what are you thinking of here? And are you saying this could work with a few technically-minded friends, or with anyone? It's hard to imagine it working with anyone. Not to be a negative Nancy or anything, I wish it were possible all the same.
- boffinAudio 3y ago>"tiny VM tucked into some obscure pool", what are you thinking of here? I imagine the OP meant that you can do a lot of things with just a tiny little VM, included in a pool of larger VM's somewhere, unassuming .. just off to the side of the main budget. >And are you saying this could work with a few technically-minded friends, or with anyone? Once you get a phpBB/mailmain system set up, its really easy to send less technically-inclined folks towards the community - but indeed, community-run servers tend to survive longer than those led by a BDFL ..
- kristov 3y agoThe barrier to entry for running your own site (something dynamic, as opposed to static hosting) is essentially the same in 2024 as it was in 2004. Gotta get a domain (and keep it registered). Gotta have an SSL cert (letsencrypt makes it better). Raspberry pi can run a lot, but getting your consumer ISP to give you a static IP is still more money. Definitely more VPS options now though. But self hosting your still basically looking at the same experience as 20 years ago, with slightly better options. Ipv6 had this promise that everyone could have mutiple public ips just for themselves, but this hasn't really been realized to its potential for some reason. We never reached that point where average Joe can run their own web presence without relying on some provider or "walled garden" owning them. If your average Joe and you want to share your thoughts online, best option today is a walled garden. How could it be made better? Average Joe can't run mailman, and certainly can't run their own mailserver.
- pupppet 3y agoBring back user-curated indexes.
- tmaly 3y agoI would take these over ad infested search results any day.
- mistermann 3y agoMakes discovery too easy, and memory holing too hard. (Conspiratorial/Systems thinking acknowledged.) https://twitter.com/reddit_lies/status/1778899250857783731 https://twitter.com/reddit_lies/status/1778899250857783731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40043297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40043297 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-world_assumption https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-world_assumption
- d--b 3y agoThe geocities times weren’t THAT cool. We mostly had to go through pages and pages of crap stuff, cause we couldn’t find shit.
- gspencley 3y agoCan we find shit now? I swear search engines are getting borderline useless. And it's not necessarily their fault, it's just very difficult to find search results these days that aren't lists of affiliate links. And in fairness, this is probably less to do with SEO'ers "gaming" the system and more to do with the fact that all of the content we actually cared about just disappeared behind walled gardens. I abandoned Google Search a few years ago because I was tired of it trying to guess what I was "really" trying to search for instead of just matching my keywords. But DuckDuckGo seems to be getting worse in this regard lately too. I will get a bunch of results that are about something I don't care about, identify a keyword that I could easily filter out and add the "-<keyword>" modifier to my search string only to see it have no effect what-so-ever. Grrr.... I also can't believe the amount of search results that take you to a walled garden. Instagram for example. You can't lurk without an account and every single time I've tried to create an account it gets automatically suspended after a few days because their system flags it as a "fake account", whatever that means. It used to mean a bot but I can easily prove that I'm a real human being and yet when I've appealed the suspension it has stuck. So it blows my mind that they rank so highly in the search results despite doing everything they can to prevent people without accounts from even being able to create accounts, let alone browse those results. The Web is dead.
- krapp 3y agoI find shit all the time. Google still works fine for me. I don't know what people on Hacker News are doing that they can never seem to find a single useful result on any search engine, ever.
- akira2501 3y agoI search for somewhat obscure and highly specific things. There are queries which used to reliably return the results I was looking for. Over the past several years these queries no longer work. It feels like the search engine used to accept whatever I typed and used that to query. The results had to be a good match for all the words in my query. This made it very easy to find exactly what I was looking for. Now google feels free to ignore terms from my query or to use synonyms instead of the exact term. The results are now exceptionally broad and no longer are a good match for the specific query I've entered. I now have to use "quotes" "around" "every" "single" "term" or go several pages deep to find the page I want.
- nf3 3y agoFrankly, I'd much rather tend to my real-life garden than any digital metaphor for one. I find it so much more gratifying!
- shadowgovt 3y agoHardly anyone ever complains that I'm doing it wrong, for starters.
- voxelghost 3y agoDid you forget to enable the comment plugin on your fence-module?
- moshun 3y agoI’m not sure it’s a binary choice, blog your garden!
- k310 3y agoWild is good as long as it's not wild as in battlefield. It's not like you get diverse opinions; no matter what you post, you get warring factions, vulgar insults, and sometimes, death threats. And bots. I posted earlier today: Anil Dash argues [1] that things can be better in not so wide-open communities. And then there’s someone like Darius Kazemi, a computer programmer and community organizer who has been patiently toiling away building tools that let others build healthy, constructive, human-scale online communities — the sort that are full of acts of kindness and genuine connection, instead of incessant fights about hate speech. There’s been a huge uptick in interest in Darius’ work as networks like Twitter have fallen apart, and a new generation discovers the joys of an internet that’s as intimate and connected as a friendly neighborhood. And this hearkens back to that surprising, and delightful, discovery that often underpinned the internet of a generation ago — sometimes the entire platform you were using to talk to others was just being run by one, passionate person. We’re seeing the biggest return to that human-run, personal-scale web that we’ve witnessed since the turn of the millennium, with enough momentum that it’s likely that 2024 is the first year since then that many people have the experience of making a new connection or seeing something go viral on a platform that’s being run by a regular person instead of a commercial entity. It’s going to make a lot of new things possible. [1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/internet-future-about-to-get-weird-1234938403/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/inte... I have had ideas for a different internet -- a network of networks. Since Stewart Brand and Ted Nelson and Kevin Kelly, technology was meant to empower and liberate people. Only a handful actually do, as in Wikipedia. People have enormous computing power in their computers and mobile devices. It often just liberates cash from their pockets. Time to reinvent. I'll share ideas later. No need for this crap: [2] Well, things changed a little bit in tech of late. Often, the power shifts in the tech world because of a dramatic new invention that solves an old problem a whole lot better. But in the current era, when most of what's getting funded and hyped up are just various attempts to undermine workers and control consumers, we're instead seeing lots of major players lose power because their signature offerings have gotten so much worse. Search engines are becoming far more useless as they attempt to chase AI hype and shoehorn in less reliable results, even as their legitimate search results get cluttered up with AI-generated crap. The most culturally influential social network has had its cultural relevance destroyed by its billionaire man-child owner's tantrum-based managemenet style. And the major mobile phone platforms overplayed their hand so badly in exerting power over their app ecosystems that regulators around the globe have responded by prying open these heretofore-closed markets. [2] https://www.anildash.com//2024/01/03/human-web-renaissance/ https://www.anildash.com//2024/01/03/human-web-renaissance/ Time for a network of networks, not a network of 4 or 5 castles surrounded by serfs.
- spxneo 3y agoNo matter what you do, 90/00s internet is never coming back They demonstrated the ready willingness use of violence by special interest groups bankrolling and giving insider trading tips to your political leaders. Meanwhile some college student torrents some Hollywood movie and gets arrested. ex) Megaupload
- autokad 3y ago[flagged]
- drak0n1c 3y agoSmartphones enabled internet addiction to reach the masses. Previously it only engaged those who had the patience and wits to maintain a PC and sit down at a desk to read and write on the internet. As long as the professional and volunteer skills to invest in a "wild" project are transferrable to that of a centralized platform, creators will gravitate to the side that has more users and can pay them more and consumers will gravitate toward the one that is easier to access and worth the according cost of entry (oftentimes free). This isn't a unique phenomenon. Look at video games. When any subculture/industry goes mainstream you don't see it preserving the thriving ecosystem of before and just adding on a synergistic mainstream bloc. Rather, the mainstream bloc cannibalizes and leaves dwindling ghost towns. That's the price of attention competition and opportunity cost.
- renegat0x0 3y agoI am running my personal web crawler since September of 2022. I gather internet domains and assign them meta information. There are various sources of my data. I assign "personal" tag to any personal website. I assign "self-host" tag to any self-host program I find. I have less than 3k of personal websites. Data are in the repository. https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database I still rely on google for many things, or kagi. It is interesting to me, what my crawler finds next. It is always a surprise to see new blog, or forgotten forum of sorts. This is how I discover real new content on the Internet. Certainly not by google which can find only BBC, or techcrunch.
- squigz 3y ago> I have less than 3k of personal websites. It is extraordinarily difficult for me to believe this is indicative of the reality of the entire Internet. I've probably visited a good chunk of this amount of personal sites.
- nvy 3y agoIt's missing my personal site at least. I'm sure there are many others.
- blackhaj7 3y agoThis site alone has links to 6k personal sites - https://aboutideasnow.com/ https://aboutideasnow.com/
- rkuykendall-com 3y agoYou appear to only have 28k domains, not exactly very many.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoThere's plenty of great fascinating wild Internet out there. The problem is finding it, since it typically struggles to be heard in a sea of well funded SEO-optimized garbage. It's a discovery problem, above all.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Timwi 3y agoI agree with you, although I wonder how we found the great fascinating wild websites before search engines even existed. I remember “web rings” but I don't think that's the whole story.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoWe've more or less always had search engines as long as there has been a public Internet. But web directories were a thing early on too.
- squigz 3y agoFor a long time, search engines weren't nearly as SEO-gamed as they are now
- aAaaArrRgH 3y agoYou could bring back web directories.
- HaZeust 3y agor/opendirectories
- emporas 3y agoThe reinforcement learning algorithm of facebook, instagram, youtube, tik-tok needs to move at the edge for that to happen. Nowadays, this seems much more probable than any other time in history, i.e last 15 years. Personal recommendation algorithms using RL, are certainly possible, because RL is the least computationally intensive training, compared to supervised, unsupervised etc. They also require some kind of social structure, but that will be setup on a blockchain, in an totally open and transparent way, yet private.
- chadsix 3y agoSelf hosting is definitely the way toward rewilding the internet. If everyone ran their own blogs, chats, email, etc. and let their systems federate thru protocol rather than on a single platform, the forests will thrive again.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cgh 3y agoThe article is primarily about breaking up certain technology companies into their broad constituent parts and mandating interoperability, presumably by law. That seems a lot more realistic than your average person self-hosting, which almost everyone would view as a hassle and a usability fail.
- johnny22 3y agoI have the technical capability to host, but I don't want the responsibility or want to spend the time. I don't wanna be interrupted from my actual work or hobbies to fix up my personal hosted stuff. I just want to let someone or some group handle that for me.
- rajeshp1986 3y agoI think internet was way awesome before digital advertising era. There should be areas of internet which should try to replicate the early internet i.e text-only design, bring back forums and no advertising revenue.
- rchaud 3y agoEven with advertising, Google Ads (then called AdSense) was a lot more generous with their revenue share than they are now. Lots of little blogs and forums thrived because the money coming in was enough to keep the proprietors interested in maintaining a community of commenters. Then comment bot spam started growing out of control, webmasters ceded the comment platform to centralized services like Disqus, and finally Google slashed ad premiums, so websites either started disappearing or getting folded into the properties of 'blog networks' and lost their personality in search of pageviews.
- efields 3y agoI'm pessimistic about the likelihood of any new "wild" internet ecologies thriving the way they did in the past. If you think of hypertext as a medium, it's been pushed to its most logical extreme already. There's not a lot of boundaries to explore. There are weird places online already, sure. And curiosities still abound. But idk… I wonder if a generation lost in cyberspace is exactly the reason why we are actually so unhappy with the internet writ large. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
- SamBam 3y ago> If you think of hypertext as a medium, it's been pushed to its most logical extreme already. I think this is an odd framing. It's not about pushing things to further extremes, it's about using all these mediums that have been allowed to wither and die. It's about getting out of the sterile high-walled gardens.
- efields 3y agoTo do what? People want to post, share pictures, share video. The gardens arose to do this more easily than setting it up yourself. There's no driving force to work outside these gardens. Let's take LiveJournal or MySpace… those services arose out of an interesting time when the metaphor of daily posting on the web was novel to a lot of people. Sharing photos on the web was novel so Flickr was created. During these times, folks are figuring out the design patterns of the web that get crafted in HTML/CSS/JS and now they've all but been standardized and commodified by Meta et al.
- statquontrarian 3y agoI like: 1. The Neocities random page: https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=random https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=random 2. The Neocities recently updated page: https://neocities.org/activity https://neocities.org/activity 3. Status Cafe: https://status.cafe/ https://status.cafe/ 4. The MidnightPub: https://midnight.pub/ https://midnight.pub/
- shadowgovt 3y agoIt's a nice essay but like so many in this space, it's really missing a key force that encourages consolidation, fights diversification, and pushes companies to centralize as much as they can into as few services as possible: Users. Users demonstrate, by their behavior, again and again, that they want simple, they want turnkey, they want inter-operation, and they want stability. And the big corps generally succeed in providing those things. Web 1.0 and most of Web 2.0 was none of those things. The easiest way to engineer those goals is to consolidate. Consolidated software developed under one roof can use incentive of money to induce engineers to figure out the "grimy" problems to make pieces of the tooling work with each other (such as GMail interoperating with Docs, or Facebook Messenger and Facebook itself). And the centralized dev houses force consolidation; for all the jokes (justifiable) about Google having too many chat options, how does it compare to the world outside their garden? How many people actually go through the hassle to get XMPP inter-operating, since Google dropping support for it didn't mean it actually went away? Not enough. A consolidated dev house doesn't have to have multiple competing social network platforms or image hosts, etc... They can maintain one, maybe float the occasional experiment, and users don't have to worry too much about change. Users actually hate many kinds of change because they build their lives atop the predictability of systems they don't control and they get angry when those systems are altered without their consent. And to head off the argument "But the FAANGs change shit all the time..." They sure do. Now compare that rate of churn to the rate of churn of how one stands up a web server, or how many non-FAANG online services have come up, run out of money, and evaporated. Inter-operation, at first glance, is the thing the walled gardens fight against. But ironically, by consolidating to one solution and letting just about everyone on the internet use it, they create an "interior inter-operation" to rival the inter-operation you can get with diverse solutions. Consider how much of Twitter you see doing a Twitter search vs. a Mastodon search, or how easy it is to find your coworkers on LinkedIn vs. finding (and using, successfully, through their spam filters) their email addresses. The single-service, one-API, few-clients model consolidates multiple things that users don't want multiple of... chat clients, search corpuses, histories, administration stories, username / password combinations, privacy policies. And this all carries consequences (get locked out for legitimate or illegitimate reasons and you're now locked out of a very big garden), but they're consequences that hit the few; for the near totality, "it just works." Regarding stability: Google has been around a quarter of a century at this point. Facebook about two decades. They may not last forever, but users understandably are more likely to stick with them than to try new things. Every new thing is more likely to be a pets-dot-com than the next Amazon, and who has time to build familiarity with someone's bespoke solution just to get that inevitable "We never hoped to have to send this message..." turndown email? And this all culminates in the lack of proliferation of browsers, because the browser enables all these features and, at the end of the day, no user (rounding for error) wants to run two or more browsers and no web developer (rounding for error) wants to accomodate the undocumented implementation quirks of two or more browsers (quirks that always exist no matter how spec-compliant they are... If they didn't exist, they'd be the same browser). So there's the occasional cry of "Why aren't there dozens of browsers" without anyone really answering who wants that? Nothing about a "rewilded" net is impossible, but users don't want to do it and don't really want to use it. Not nearly enough to make it into something as big as the consolidated service providers. It's a nice hobby for people who really care about how the machinery works to dabble in (I, too, run a Mastodon node...), but I don't see anything pushing people out of their Facebooks, their Amazons, or their Googles, in the near future. Not if the alternative is for regular users to have to do more work than they do today.
- hfgjbcgjbvg 3y agoWould agree.
- kderbyma 3y ago"The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late." I really agree. so often simplification alone is not enough. it should be a guiding principle, but not ignorant of the necessary complexity
- mikewarot 3y agoThere aren't any operating systems capable of withstanding the internet for a year without updates and/or active management. Until this becomes possible, and widespread, the idea of self-hosting is going to remain niche. Furthermore, because no browser is totally secure, users are going to avoid non-popular links, perpetuating the walled gardens they already use. I fear our monoculture of operating systems has to be addressed first, before any of the rest can really take hold.
- wswope 3y agoWhere’s that idea coming from? I’d wager >95% of LTS linux distributions released in the past ten years are still rock-solid if you’re just exposing 22, 80, and 443. Even PHP5 is still de facto bulletproof if you’re paranoid about not trusting user input. Vulns don’t come out of nowhere.
- squigz 3y ago> monoculture of operating systems There are several widely-used OS, one of which (Linux) has plenty of very different versions depending on your usecase. I'm not really sure that counts as a "monoculture"
- toast0 3y ago> There aren't any operating systems capable of withstanding the internet for a year without updates and/or active management. I regularly update my personal systems, but when I ran FreeBSD for work, we only did kernel and OS updates for important things. Most of our machines would turn on, build and install our latest tested and patched version and reboot, and that would be the last time it rebooted until it was time to recycle it 3-5 years later. Yeah, I looked at every update, and most of them weren't important enough to upgrade existing working machines; I guess that's active management: I did consider and most often choose to take no action, but it's still not many actions taken. That's not to say FreeBSD is perfect; it's not, there were certainly some updates that needed to go to all machines right quick. Some of the applications we ran on the other hand... It was a great day when we replaced Wordpress, because I was no longer on the hook to spend a day updating that with no notice. I would be ok leaving my current hosting for a year and confident it will be fine when I get back; other than it a disk encryption passphrase to boot after a power incident. Mostly Linux with minimal software that's mostly finished is fine too; although I won't run it personally anymore, except in OpenWRT and other embedded systems where I don't have much choice.
- peppertree 3y agoTruth is with LLM and chat as main interface, it's going to be harder and harder for niche sites to be surfaced.
- rchaud 3y agoChat isn't a main interface now by any means and I doubt it will be beyond answering queries of an academic/work nature.
- web-cowboy 3y agoI wanted Tim Berners-Lee's "Solid" project to be at least a partial foundation for this, but it doesn't seem to be getting traction. Some way to "self-host" or "own my own data" isn't very possible in a world of complex system administration and cloud providers, GDPR/Privacy, etc. Maybe solving this problem (via FOSS, hopefully) and giving people their own internet-in-a-kit could be a good way to go? Are there active projects like this? Is it even feasible?
- Kon-Peki 3y agoI don’t think the solid project is feasible. If you create a pod and give someone access to information within it, you probably have to assume that they are going to make a copy of it and that they will share this copy with others. So what’s the point of going to all the trouble of setting it up in the first place?
- thesagan 3y agoThe Internet is not Detroit, but like Detroit it expanded very very fast and was very very innovative and open. Then it consolidated, which is ongoing. Things settled… for a while. The early days of Detroit saw hundreds of little innovative experimental companies that over time became the big three. The rest is history. Detroit is the victim of its own invention. Luckily my analogy isn’t a very good one, the Internet is nothing like Detroit. It is, however, interesting how quickly wild things can be tamed, and that may beckon a cautionary lesson.
- toss1 3y ago>>"...a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late." This a thousand times over. This should be taught in schools and repeated from the earliest grades to post-grad. It bears repetition, sufficient that it is seen by everyone as obvious. Then, perhaps the society will value complexity and diversity as the true strengths that they are. Homogenizing and monoculture will kill us all, whether it is forestry, agriculture, human cultures, economies, the internet, or mil or corporate orgs. Uniformity is brittleness.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoThis is a great article, but it's missing the elephant in the room: copyright. There's a reason that our society has allowed <10 companies to own the internet: the internet is content. Anyone who can claim to "own" content has the right to monopolize it. We didn't simply allow corporations to build walls of garden around us: we enshrined those walls as a legal right! This article opens with a great metaphor, comparing the internet to a forest. Let's continue that metaphor, and see how copyright fits in. What is a tree made of? Content. Copyright doesn't simply give someone ownership of their garden, it gives them ownership of entire species. Want to grow an Apple tree? Too bad: you don't have the right to copy Apple's species. Want to pollinate your gnu tree with an Apple tree? No can do: Apple trees were intentionally designed to be incompatible with free range bees. Every thing we do on the internet is carefully managed with contracts centered around copyright. Giant corporations own nearly all the copy rights. Is it any surprise that they write all the contracts? We need to rewild the internet; and to do that, we (and our peers) will need seeds.
- seoulmetro 3y agoPeople who think this is possible are naive. It's not just the internet that has become a monoculture, it's the entire planet. Thanks to the internet.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoStart by bringing back Stumble. It was a very good discovery service, with plenty of variety. https://web.archive.org/web/20060902030402fw_/http://www.stumbleupon.com/demo.php%3Fsite%3D1%26tag%3Dall https://web.archive.org/web/20060902030402fw_/http://www.stu...
- curious_cat_163 3y agoI recall using a plugin for it! I can imagine a place for it today.
- bingbangboom 3y ago[dead]
- higgins 3y agoSit at 24HourHomepage.com for a minute or two
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago"Whatever we do, the internet isn't returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or each organization running its own mail server, rather than operating off G-Suite." It does not need to "return" to FTP because FTP is still in use. Periodically I am submitting examples of FTP servers to HN that are still operated today that are often critical to software developers and so-called "tech" companies.
- sp332 3y agoFTP support has been removed from Firefox and Chrome. It's a lot harder to browse now.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoNB. When I submit examples of FTP servers to HN I submit the HTTPS mirror, so even people using popular web browsers that have removed FTP support can still access the files. I prefer using a dedicated FTP client myself but it's good to have an HTTPS mirrors, too.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- anal_reactor 3y ago[flagged]
- gilmore606 3y ago> We cannot tell all people below certain IQ to just stop using the internet What, why not? It couldn't be that hard to trick them.
- sneak 3y agoStart an ssh-only bbs.
- probably_wrong 3y agoI have considered something like that in the past. The problem is that you can't stop someone else from making a web frontend (with ads on it, of course) and now you're back to were you started.
- sneak 3y agoFairly straightforward to block such shenanigans.
- HaZeust 3y agoI think Tor has done an amazing job at keeping those away who don't want to put effort into niche web-surfing, and those easily scared and/or duped into not discovering less-charted territories. Not to mention, it costs a LOT of money to mirror clearweb material on the deep web - and it's a grueling process. I wouldn't be surprised if the Internet was re-wilded in the context of Onion routing and Tor relays.
- deelly 3y agoBlocking other users that (probably) did nothing wrong is always the first thing that comes to mind. Do people with bigger IQ is more ethical, more friendly, more interesting, more liberal to different views? Do people here is more ethical, more friendly, more interesting, more liberal to different views?
- giantrobot 3y agoWhile I don't disagree with the general sentiment the old Internet (late 90s to first half of the 00s) was very different topologically from the Internet of today. Colleges especially were lousy with IP addresses. They'd assign a routable IP to every computer on their campus, including the ResNets. They also handed out shared disk space on servers because that was new and novel. If you knew the right people you could even get a vanity subdomain on the school's domain. A significant amount of "wild" Internet content was found on those servers that lived on college campuses. Another significant source of "wild" content was ISP-provided web space. Most ISPs offered a few tens of megabytes of web hosting easily accessed via FTP. A lot of HTML authoring software of the era could publish directly to an FTP account. While the likes of GeoCities and AngelFire get a lot of the nostalgia today, they were far from the only source of garish web pages filled with questionable content. In the early 00s colleges stopped giving out routable IPs to everything with a NIC and started cracking down on closet servers and web space. Besides the network security angle the MPAA and RIAA were on a tear suing colleges for "hosting" pirated content. ISPs also dropped their shared hosting around the same time. By 2010 all the major free web hosting services had shut down or enshittified to uselessness. Without those places a lot of "wild" content just died out. People did move to hosted blogs like LiveJournal, Wordpress, or Tumblr but even those weren't the same type of "wild" sites that came before. The "wild" content has been further hurt by Google's algorithms' insistence that only content published in the past ten seconds is worthwhile and even then its only worthwhile if its SEOed to death and has Google Ads running on it. For the most part people just moved to social media. There's zero need for administration, bandwidth is a non-issue, and publishing is pushing "Post". The downside is its social media and discoverability or even availability outside the platform is challenging or non-existent. For non-technical people it's extremely difficult to set up a "wild" site on the Internet anymore. Even for the technically inclined it's a thankless pain in the ass to administer and keep up. If you do set something up it becomes a constant battle against spammers and script kiddies. Even just something going viral can get your account suspended or rack up huge egress fees on a cloud provider. I love the idea of re-wilding the Internet we shouldn't pretend the Internet of today is the same as the Internet of the last century. Edit: I a word.
- sirspacey 3y agoBring back the 90s blog culture. I’m over everything else.
- Nifty3929 3y agoAll of the same sorts of people are willing and able today (myself included) to host our own content on quirky little sites. But the difference is that before, we were it - there was nobody else hosting anything much. There wasn't anything else. Now everybody, and every company is online. We're simply drowned in an overwhelming sea of mundane banality. And, frankly - normal, ordinary, every-body stuff. Reading the news. Doing some banking. It's not that we're not here - it's just that everybody else is here too. The internet is now the place that nobody goes to because it's too crowded.
- royaltjames 3y agoReminds me of mmm.page
- mmaniac 3y ago> ... So-called “scientific forestry,” was that century’s growth hacking: it made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. ... This is a general principle of optimization, which maximises efficiency at the expense of redundancy and anti-fragility. Unfortunately, the ability to withstand an unexpected catastrophe does not appear on a balance sheet until the catastrophe strikes.
- euroderf 3y agoAnd then (as a general rule in the modern economy), if catastrophe strikes and you get a bailout, you have successfully socialized the risk. Profit!
- RecycledEle 3y agoBefore we can rewild the Internet, we need to stop employers from firing people over Internet posts. That starts in the USA with enforcing the 1st Amendment. If you work for the Government or if your employer accepts Government money in any form, then you can not censor your employees in their private lives. I can post the most repugnant thing you have ever read, and the 1st Amendment says you can not even discuss it with me at work. That's the way freedom works. The enshittification of the Internet starts and ends in HR.
- RecycledEle 3y agoThe First Amendment overrules US Law. The First Amendment overrules State Law. The First Amendment overrules company policy.