5 ms·
The Internet has been shrinking massively. My earliest experiences with the Internet were discovering the world of hobby OS dev around the turn of the millenniu
by sph 2mo ago
The Internet has been shrinking massively. My earliest experiences with the Internet were discovering the world of hobby OS dev around the turn of the millennium, when I chanced upon someone’s personal website talking about their OS, with source code and screenshots and dedicated forum. My mind was blown. I spent two years finding hundreds of small websites dedicated to the topic, hung out on IRC communities with other teenage OS nerds like me, and of course participated in the nascent osdev.org forum. To note that all of those websites were readily found through Google, and interlinked with their own topic webrings.
Today everything has disappeared or has been conglomerated into siloes, sanitised, focusing on engagement. You have YouTube videos about it (which is more cheap entertainment than actual education), you get some posts here once in a while, there’s Reddit where all intelligent discussion goes to die. IRC is a wasteland of idle bouncers. Then the LLMs arrived to kill what is left.
Who says the Internet is a vibrant place today mistakes flashiness with depth. It’s all empty calories, just makes you hungry for more, never satisfies.
- shoobiedoo 2mo agoOn a whim I watched my favorite childhood movie last week, Hackers. It's goofy in some ways, but man it captures the "wild west" feeling of early and mid 90's internet. It was just you, a slow connection to anywhere, and open ports all over the place. Right after I watched it, I dusted off an old hub, connected a few external usb-to-ethernet adapters to my work PC VM's, and now run them through an OpenBSD packet filter. For no reason at all other than to feel that again: me, watching packets, having total control. Hitting a wall and having to read a manpage. I don't really have a point I guess, other than even after being steeped in a dead internet for years (with a slow decline spanning at least a decade arguably) I need to approach what I think is the internet in a completely different way. As in, not at all besides what is absolutely required for work. We're ants in a jar now, not cowboys like we used to be.
- farzd 2mo ago"Let's echo 23, see what's up"
- dd8601fn 2mo agoThat movie is ridiculous and still great. At least as a nostalgia pump. And the red box references and pots patching and such were true enough, even if everything else got hilarious hollywood treatment.
- agentcoops 2mo agoIf I recall correctly, the film actually had Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600 and Kevin Mitnick as consultants, so despite the hollywood treatment you have moments of accuracy like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U9MI0u2VIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U9MI0u2VIE. Probably the only time Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools made it to the big screen. At the yearly 2600 conference, they used to always do a big group rollerblade through NYC.
- dd8601fn 2mo agoCereal Killers name was Emmanuel Goldstein, too. That movie still gives me wardialing and 2600 meetups and “voice bridging from a Dennys payphone bank at silly hours” memories.
- account42 2mo agoYeah it's a whole lot better than the usual Hollywood depiction of hacking which brought us gems like creating a GUI in visual basic to trace and IP address. And more importantly it doesn't take itself too seriously which I think makes the ridiculous parts work just like much sci-fi takes liberties with the science part when required for the story.
- shoobiedoo 2mo agoInteresting, yeah I thought there must have been some consultation there. Especially because there's a couple instances where the hackers rely on social engineering over the phone first, and faking the "coin added" noise on the payphone. I guess a hollywood suit could have come up with that, but I doubt it
- sph 2mo agoMay I suggest you to look into mesh networks? I am a huge fan of Reticulum. Using it feels like being a pioneer, the scene is very welcoming. The pitch: it is network-agnostic. The same mesh network runs on the Internet or through LoRa radios or any other physical layer than allows the exchange of data packets. It scales from private networks to global meshes. It's the wild west. People are excited, and eager to grow further. https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/
- shoobiedoo 2mo agoThank you! I'll definitely look into this.
- inigyou 2mo agoThat's funny because the internet is also network-agnostic. It's xkcd927.
- kaoD 2mo agoI always find these mesh networks landing pages a bit lacking in information, and I wish they weren't. How is this different to, from example, Yggdrasil Network[0]? https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/
- OCTAGRAM 2mo agoThere are retrocommunity sites. DOS, OS/2 (eComStation, ArcaOS), Amiga (Apollo Vampire), Mavericks Forever. Amiga is quite alive community. If I am to write game, I consider this platform. Steam game will be lost in 100.000 games, and Amiga game will be noticed. There is I2P. They have been disabling scripts for ideological reasons, so there were many websites without scripts. I have used quite exotic Charon web browser from Inferno OS in I2P. That was 15 years ago. Don't know how it's now. There is RetroNAS and plenty of other software to enrich home network.
- sgt 2mo agoGood point on Amiga. It's truly a vibrant community, still. I follow Amiga Bill and Retro Hour etc.
- Melatonic 2mo agoCheckout Kagi SmallWeb !
- sph 2mo agoI love Kagi, I am a paid user since day 1, but SmallWeb is a collection of English-speaking tech blogs, it cannot even begin to compete in diversity with the GeoCities era of the web. (to be fair: I've had Kagi employees telling me their dataset is growing larger and more diverse every day, so worth keeping an eye on it) Sometimes I use Marginalia's "Vintage Web" search for niche topics; most results are dead blogs and old .edu personal websites that someone forgot to delete, still a vanishing minority of anything one could find in 2001.
- Razengan 2mo agoWell, just as the "internet" supplanted newspapers, magazines (gosh those classic gaming mags), and broadcast television for many people, and how the newspapers replaced the town criers before them, why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium? Why should I have to suffer through Fandom raping me with screen-obscuring banners and "PLEASE ALLOW ADS" just to make some sense of fucking Warhammer 40K lore (written by unpaid volunteers anyway)? instead of just asking ChatGPT what the fuck Globriznaroks is/are. Why should we support shady companies by sitting through their ads on YouTube videos for minute topics instead of just asking AI for the shit I want to know about? Why should we submit to the whims of 3 mods on a subreddit deciding what thousands should get to see (fuck /r/AskScience) and then getting low-effort answers or outright trolling anyway? instead of just asking AI? Bury me, I am ready.
- Tarq0n 2mo agoWhere is the information going to come from though? LLMs aren't primary sources, they consume and regurgitate.
- Razengan 2mo agoI guess/hope that's where Yann LeCun and their proposed "world models" etc are going to fill in :)
- pjc50 2mo agoThis is better for you as an individual, but worse for society as a whole. As you've noticed, monetization is the weak spot. AI will not escape being ruined by monetization, but it might be harder to notice when it arrives.
- Razengan 2mo agoCorrect, the enshittification of AI would fuck us up more widely and deeply than the enshittification of the internet but..that's not a problem inherent to the technology or medium itself. That's a separate problem that's the responsibility of laws and society to solve
- TFNA 2mo agoI, too, look back fondly on the early web. Lately, though, I have been thinking that one reason for its decline wasn't just corporate interests like we often talk about here. A significant number of early bloggers were middle-aged and elderly people. After decades, they simply aged out. The younger generation that replaced them (albeit not so much among OS nerds like yourself) was less likely to use a real computer and keyboard as their interface to the internet, just a smartphone. Hence long-form text died.
- mike_hearn 2mo agoWhile we're here exchanging old man stories, I remember the web before blogs existed! I guess we can organize the internet into these eras, each of which was in some sense harder and more expensive to find available info than in the previous: 1. Pre-web. Internet is mostly about messages sent to individuals or groups. USENET organizes group discussion into browseable topic-oriented hierarchies, IRC does the same but with lists in fragmented networks. If the discussion exists at all, finding it is easy. 2. Early web. Dominated by topic focused websites, early online shops and personal home pages. Search engines suck and face strong competition from manually maintained topic-oriented directories (did anyone else here contribute to DMoz?), content discovery is mutual and webmasters help each other out by joining "web rings". DoubleClick and AdSense start to funnel small amounts of money to creators, but it's enough to offset hosting costs and in many cases can make web hosting effectively free or even yield a small profit. This encourages an explosion of website creation. Discussion moves off USENET onto phpBB forums. Every organization decides it's a cultural imperative to have a presence on the information superhighway. Finding information is easy as long as you can figure out what topic it belongs to. 3. Blogging and centralization era. The internet starts to rebuild itself around people as the primary object, not the topic or category. Directories die because websites can no longer be categorized by content. Web rings die for the same reason. IRC is replaced by instant messengers that are about connecting people with pre-existing friends, not mutual interest groups. Outside of institutional websites that exist to promote the organization, things become hard to find without highly centralized search engines because nobody is putting any effort into organizing or indexing what they write anymore: maybe you get a few tags if you're lucky. Spam, hacking and lack of SSO causes forums to centralize onto Reddit. This is the peak of the search engine era because you are forced to use Google to find anything. The power eventually corrupts the tech firms and they begin political censorship to benefit the left in 2015 [1]. Enormous amounts of information is deliberately made unfindable as part of a large-scale programme of social control. 4. Social media era. All the same problems as blogging except now the bulk of the content goes behind login walls that stop search engines from surfacing them. Video and podcasts start to matter more, both of which are unsearchable by default. Eventually video completely dominates, as few younger people want to read when they could watch instead. Firefox starts to replace IE6, and then Chrome. They bring ad blockers in their wake which starts to choke off ad revenues, so many websites from the web's first era go unmaintained and eventually offline. This is somewhat but not entirely compensated by the falling cost of web hosting. Social media remains because it puts people's faces next to everything, allowing clout farming and viral notoriety that can sometimes be monetized by becoming an influencer. The only part of the web's first era that really survives into this era is Wikipedia and Reddit, which by this time substitute monetary rewards for power tripping by a small group of ideologically driven moderators. 5. AI era. Information is so heavily scattered over so many tiny sourcelets and search engines have become sufficiently useless that full neural integration of knowledge is required, with LLMs issuing massively parallel and complex search engine queries as a backstop. What can we predict for the AI era? Institutional websites will remain because institutions still have an interest in getting their agenda into LLMs, but visual redesign efforts will largely cease as traffic stats seen by executives show visits completely dominated by AI. There will be lots of conversations of the form, "why redesign our website to look more modern when 99% of traffic is AI which won't care?" Blogs will go the same way as the thematic websites they killed, disappearing as the authors age out. A lot of effort will be put into finding ways to block AI crawlers to create 'human only' spaces, especially by social media firms, but these will fail because AI will just be integrated directly into browsers and become unblockable - and anyway, the incentives to create will be ignored. ChatGPT style text oriented interfaces will last until inferencing capacity catches up, being eventually replaced by voice interaction and on the fly video generation for nearly all users. Where we go from here is hard to say. Content creation was most pure in the web's first era, where people with knowledge were incentivized to share it with the world by the promise of a bit of fame combined with ad clicks to offset hosting costs. Ad blockers, social media and AI killed that world. You could however bring it back by producing a new platform that isn't like the web, one where AI and search engines are blocked via technological means (e.g. confidential computing). How much anyone would actually enjoy such a web is unclear. [1] https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-internet https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-inter...
- Retr0id 2mo agoMost hobby communities in my spheres of interest have been subsumed into Discord. It is yet another silo, but it does feel lively. I don't think I'm contradicting you here, I just feel less negatively about it.
- sgt 2mo agoI don't think I've ever tried Discord. Is it like IRC? Or more like a forum
- inigyou 2mo agoIt's like IRC but it works on phones and has emoji reactions and GIFs which are necessary to attract gen alpha.
- Retr0id 2mo agoCloser to IRC, although they do have forum-like features. Unlike a regular forum, it has no web-facing presence (unless you rig up some kind of bot to mirror it).
- Cipater 2mo agoI think Discord is one of the worst things to happen to the web. So much useful, interesting content gets walled off and locked away. It's not public, not searchable, not linkable, not indexable. I'm never going to stumble across an interesting tidbit of information on Discord while browsing the web. And even when you do have access to a particular server, you'll often struggle to find something posted a while back, even if you know exactly what you're looking for. I hate Discord with a passion.
- qznc 2mo agoYes, I share your hate. Unfortunately, the open web is apparently too hostile now for any sizeable open community.
- alightsoul 2mo ago
- alightsoul 2mo agoThat's because people stopped linking pages together. Everyone moved to social media like instagram and TikTok. Those are very computationally intensive to index, so they just aren't indexed at all or only the description is indexed. And they have no links. Links were never conceptualized on the medium and they have reasons not to like keeping ad revenue. People moved to phones, and customizable websites are very hard to make on mobile. However they sometimes make videos or take screenshots or something instead of making fan sites. Amino kind of tried to solve this but was never able to control child grooming. The people talking about their os now publish it on social media or YouTube. The posts become "the community". And people migrated to reddit.