5 ms·

I agree, but it's been said by all... make homebrew software for an old Nintendo console pick up cross stitching or weaving make an independent film with a f

• jonhohle 5mo ago
  Even the fun things “on the internet” are mostly still possible, it’s just the bulk of things we do now are not fun and main companies aren’t quirky risk takers but the oil/train/steel barons of our day. In the past few years I’ve done serveral of the things on your list in earnest and they are all easier to do today (specifically technical things) than they were 25 years ago (except maybe writing with a pen). Edit to add: if I have to join another messaging platform for a single, specific group I’m going to move to the woods and require written correspondence. It’s automated phone service level of frustration.
  • coffeebeqn 5mo ago
    Don’t try to make money from it and you can still do fun things in life
    • fragmede 5mo ago
      How do you balance that with the need for money to afford things in life though? There's a lot of things I could go do if I didn't have to think about bills to pay.
      • armchairhacker 5mo ago
        How did they in the 1990s/2000s/2010s?
        • doctorwho42 5mo ago
          Lower cost of living and higher incomes when compared to purchasing power of a dollar.
          • joe_mamba 5mo ago
            That and also people weren't paying for Netflix, Disney+, PlayStation online, ChatGPT+, etc Edit: Also people were having more kids back then and earlier in life, so they had less time for hobbies and "finding one's self", they'd be busy with their kids and work. The bored DINKS with free time looking for hobbies is a relatively recent phenomenon in western societies (10-15 years).
            • simianparrot 5mo ago
              Nobody needs to pay for any of that
              • joe_mamba 5mo ago
                Says who? Please define your definition of the word "needs" here in this context. With this logic, nobody also "needs" to buy a Ford F-250 Super Duty, a MacBook Pro M5, an RTX 5090, a recreational boat, drink Starbucks daily, etc if your definition of "needs" is just limited to day survival meaning just providing food and shelter but nothing more, and yet people buy them anyway, because it's entertainment, not because they need them to survive. People will still want escapism and entertainment ESPECIALLY when their lives suck, like in times of economic depression, be it cigarettes, booze, junk food, porn, games, gambling, movies and TV shows, etc, even if you think people don't "need" them. This is how people function. It's scientifically documented.
                • dgellow 5mo ago
                  What a stretch to go from cars and luxury laptop to daily survival
      • joe_mamba 5mo ago
        You do one thing you don't particularly enjoy too much for 8h/day as your job to earn money, then you do your hobby you can afford and enjoy for <8h/day, then you sleep for ~8h/day. Rinse and repeat.
        • moffkalast 5mo ago
          And of course the other chores: cooking, shopping, cleaning, etc. come out of the part you don't particularly enjoy right? Right?
          • joe_mamba 5mo ago
            You mean part time work, which already exists?
            • moffkalast 5mo ago
              No I mean that the 19th century 8-8-8 rule is nonsense today, when people's leisure time is being eaten up by their commute and other responsibilities, so it ends up being more like 7 hours sleep, 2 hours hobbies, 15 hours work.
              • joe_mamba 5mo ago
                >No I mean that the 19th century 8-8-8 rule is nonsense today You think 19th century workers had time for 8h of hobbies per day? Let me have what you've been smoking because that's some good stuff. >when people's leisure time is being eaten up by their commute and other responsibilities You think 19th century people had no/less responsibilities? How out of touch do you have to be to see yourself as more oppressed than 19th century workers, when you have abundant food in the supermarkets you don't have to farm, door to door food delivery, online solvable bureaucracy, cars, planes, ambulances and emergency rooms with MRIs, CT scanners and cures for most diseases, OSHA, social security, longest life expectancy ever in the history of mankind, residential heating and cooling at your fingertips, etc. stuff even kings in the 19th century didn't have, a society where you can live a life where you never have to leave your house if you don't want to, yet somehow you think workers had a more leisurely life back then. WHAT?! > 15 hours work. Put yourself in the position of an employer trying to start/run a business today. Are your customers gonna pay you extra so you can pay your workers for their private chores and commute?
      • funimpoded 5mo ago
        “You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for.” - An older neighbor counseling the has-things-relatively-great-but-unhappy-anyway protagonist in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road
      • DocTomoe 5mo ago
        That's why 'fun on the internet' was, always has been, is, and always will be a hobby, not a job. If you do things for money, you optimize not for fun, but for return of (time) investment. Which is only fun if you have other issues.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • damnesian 5mo ago
      many livings are based on it now, though. I guess platforms like TikTok might better be thought of as "want to peep in on what a bunch of people do for money now?" which makes it feel (paradoxically, since it is a performance) a bit invasive and unseemly.
  • DivingForGold 5mo ago
    Retired with substantial savings, refitting my 40 year old Hobie Cat 18, heading to the beach to spend more time with the dolphins and seagulls. ... and any interesting humans that I meet walking the beach.
    • bronson 5mo ago
      Perfect OK Boomer response. If this is parody then I salute you! So good.
  • brightball 5mo ago
    We need to bring back BBS's over short range radio transmitters. The early dialup and BBS world was magic and it pulls everything completely off of the standard channels.
    • functionmouse 5mo ago
      party van will get you for doing anything like that
      • brightball 5mo ago
        What’s party van?
    • dd8601fn 5mo ago
      I was JUST working on this based on the solarpunk forum article that was on Hackaday, yesterday. I was trying to do Enigma with a captive portal wifi setup and a (heavily stylized) terminal in a browser. Figured a pi zero w2 might do the job on solar. The idea was occasional fidonet pickup, some door games, and probably disabled file base. I could seed a few on friends and family porches in the neighborhood, and just see if anyone uses them. It (enigma) was proving to be a real pain though, and I decided to shelve it for a bit. The Hackaday one: https://hackaday.com/2026/05/04/esp32-hosts-solarpunk-message-board/ https://hackaday.com/2026/05/04/esp32-hosts-solarpunk-messag...
    • sellmesoap 5mo ago
      Reticulum/Rnode is one option, but then mesh-core-tastic, signal, session, simplex, briar, whatschat, insta-don't sell a gram (no more e2ee) etc. etc. Let me know when the cool kids figure it out, you can reach me on my fossil instance over i2p :D
• neilwilson 5mo ago
  Or just make homebrew. It’s amazing how good just fermenting juice from the supermarket with a bit of added sugar can be. It teaches patience and the blip blop of an airlock is a terrifically calming way to mark the passage of time.
  • soopypoos 5mo ago
    I can't wait to find out if I made pruno or jenkem
• summa_tech 5mo ago
  I think the issue is that while you can (and perhaps should) do at least one such thing, it's going to be a pretty lonely pursuit, unless you have a pre-existing group of people to connect over this. The Internet used to be really good at random, unscripted collaboration. But the winner-takes-all nature of modern social media means that if you do not optimize your presentation for maximum engagement, you will not even be noticed. Even people who would've greatly enjoyed what you have to tell them will instead be fed a mix of generic engagement slop, sort-of relevant influencer videos, vaguely targeted ads and political propaganda.
  • fragmede 5mo ago
    Why do they have to be pre-exisiting? Release the whatever to the world, make a Discord for it, and find people that way.
    • dgellow 5mo ago
      I hate the switch to discord so much…
  • frm88 5mo ago
    The Internet used to be really good at random, unscripted collaboration. It sometimes still is, albeit only on niche sites like tumblr, which created Goncharov (1973) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goncharov_(meme) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goncharov_(meme)
• the__alchemist 5mo ago
  I concur! Explore the big, bold world outside the internet. Or, on the internet, stop spending your valuable time on bottom-feeder content like medium articles, facebook, twitter/bluesky, rant blogs, news websites etc.
  • sevenzero 5mo ago
    >bottom-feeder content So 99% of posts on Hackernews, got it.
    • bpavuk 5mo ago
      99%? if you count all submitted posts, then yeah, maybe even 99.5%, but the frontpage is maybe 90%
  • dgellow 5mo ago
    Do you have interesting urls to recommend?
    • the__alchemist 5mo ago
      Good question. No, unless we have similar interests and hobbies. Specialized topics and fields (I observe anecdotally) tend to be less vulnerable to the optimization this article laments!
  • Melatonic 5mo ago
    Kagi Small Web !!
    • uncircle 5mo ago
      It’s all mostly American tech blogs. I mean, it’s a nice initiative, but it’s less diverse than Hacker News.
      • bhrlady 5mo ago
        (Disclosure: I work at Kagi) Thanks for checking it out. There's currently over 30K blogs in the feed and we try to diversify it as much as possible. We welcome anyone to contribute more blogs, video channels and comics here: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb#%EF%B8%8F-guidelines-for-site-inclusion-to-the-list-%EF%B8%8F https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb#%EF%B8%8F-guidelines-...
• thinkingtoilet 5mo ago
  Over the last few years my wife and I have grown into a community of awesome people. It makes all the difference. Do literally anything you can offline. Go to some meet up. Volunteer. Go to a con or an event. Learn an instrument. Literally anything. Do as if your long term mental health depends on it, because it just might. Be silly. Be cringe. Dress up. Get far far away from the internet with actual people.
• MSFT_Edging 5mo ago
  Everything you said is good, but I think it misses the point of the blog post. The internet was special because it was a place to share those weird, human endeavors. I can do all I want in the solitude of my home but I want to share it! The internet is where you can find people with common interests that you can't find in people you know IRL. That was the escape. Finally you feel less alone, a stranger on the other side of the world feels the same way! That's what was optimized. We were herded into centralized algorithmic bubbles, optimized for creation and consumption but not for sharing. Sharing has some care in it, a common need for something, a connection between two or more people. The internet has been optimized for consumption. Everyone is consuming in the same place, repeating the same jokes, and it all moves too fast to even recognize the same usernames you might see. It all moves too fast, there's little incentive for platform owners to make a place where people actually connect at the speed of human socializing because if you're busy connecting, you're not seeing the next ad. Also I'd just like to add, reddit killed the classic forum. Many are gone, some are holding on by a thread. You can't just "avoid the bad parts" because the bad parts consumed the good parts.
  • Folcon 5mo ago
    Just realised that reading your message, I really feel this, I've been designing a game and I've recently been having discussions with friends and people interested in it and it's just a really different experience talking with them vs posting about it, don't get me wrong, having a weekly cadence is nice and Sharing Saturdays can be really helpful to get the word out there, but it's such a different interaction and mindspace I end up in during the "plan to explain to people in this weird advertising, but not process about my passion project", vs "talk to someone about my passion" And I'm aware that these are different activities, but I don't think they should be as far apart emotionally as they end up being? For example the last discussion I had we talked about how I was exploring connecting the impact of actions in the small scale to the large scale, for example how designing a particular construct or vehicle, would change how efficiently a player would be able to mine and that would then impact how much that particular player made from mining in that area This creates all sorts of interesting questions and even just that discussion was engaging
• dogleash 5mo ago
  A: "The vibe at my favorite bar has changed" B: "You are still perfectly capable of having fun in life" I don't really get how B follows from A. B is true, but A wasn't implying not-B.
• bradley13 5mo ago
  This. Yes, the mass internet is curated, created and censored. Usenet is a distant memory. But some changes are positive. I recently retired. I've programmed for 50 years, both for work and for fun. My son asked: so what's your project? I had to think about it, and I've decided to learn GPU programming - something completely new to me. With AI as a tutor, this will be massively easier than at any time in the past. In some ways, the state of AI now is reminiscent of the state of the internet 25 years ago.
• Waterluvian 5mo ago
  A little while ago I got my hodge podge Amazon soldering kit out and took the time to fix two DMG-01 Game Boys from my childhood. I opened up a bunch of PS5 controllers and replaced the analog sticks with hall sensors. Nothing about what I did was impressive. I’m a novice at best. But I haven’t felt so fulfilled in such a long time. I had a serious moment of thinking, “I wish I could quit my career and just repair electronics for people.”
  • functionmouse 5mo ago
    I repair electronics every once in a while and I've always hated doing it. If you actually like doing that, then you absolutely should try doing it for a living.
• scelerat 5mo ago
  as someone who laments the loss of spaces and pastimes that once brought people together -- bowling alleys, dance halls, pubs, movie houses, etc. -- to work from home, home entertainment and especially anything and everything online, I keep hoping for some kind of reversal. Maybe the day is getting closer when anything and everything internet-related is so drenched in uncanny artifice and extractionary intention that people will yearn for imperfect, multidimensional reality, and feel like the best thing they can do with their time is walk through the park with a friend.
• vinceguidry 5mo ago
  all of these things are not internet.
• Forgeties79 5mo ago
  I swapped to Linux last year and my computer has actually been fun. Bazzite is great. I barely tinker with it if ever and it’s mostly because I feel like it, not out of necessity. I have a very reliable gaming and video editing machine, mostly using open source stuff, and I am in no way a coder/programmer/engineer. I just love using it. Tinkering with retro consoles has also been very satisfying. I would say more than half of the consoles in my home are modded in some way or another. My kids love it. Then of course there’s film photography. Talk about a great way to force yourself to be intentional and patient. You can buy any dinky camera and a nifty 50 for like $100, it’ll work just fine. Just get out there and shoot and send off your rolls to be processed. Even just getting one or two good shots out of a roll feels fantastic. Every single photo you take matters and is memorable. It’s refreshing.
• harimau777 5mo ago
  That seems kind of like a non-sequiter none of that stuff has anything to do with what made the internet special so I don't see how doing so would help either bring the internet back or create a viable alternative.
• ButlerianJihad 5mo ago
  > pick up cross stitching or weaving Ironically, it was the Jacquard Loom that made redundant a generation of highly-skilled, mostly female, weavers. Of course, any human can choose to take up this hobby manually, but we will never again compete in the job market with machines that are accurate, blindingly fast, and so far haven’t demanded the right to vote
  • cindyllm 5mo ago
    [dead]
• JKCalhoun 5mo ago
  Ha ha, just discovered these kids from 1989 using their parent's camcorder: https://youtu.be/IvHaL2BxqvM?t=151 https://youtu.be/IvHaL2BxqvM?t=151 We can still do that.
• jjav 5mo ago
  Encourage yourself and all your similar-minded people to keep the fun going! Yes, 99.99(however many 9s)% of the internet is walled-garden advertising garbage. But, you can exist in the remaining space and bring your friends along! I run my website and my blog like I've always done (since 1994), I run mailing lists for a few topics (some date back to 1991) and subscribe to many others. Zero corporate involvement, no ads, no monopolist in control. Just peer to peer real people. I run my email server so I can communicate without depending on the monopolists. There are still hobby forums for specialty topics, or start your own! I even still read Usenet weekly. And so on... The fun parts of the Internet used to be all of it, now it is a niche, but it's still there for you. Keep it alive!