Everyone lamenting this needs to check out neocities, or even get into publishing your own website. Even if it’s on a “big evil” service like GoDaddy or AWS, whatever. As long as it’s easy for you. Or learn to self host a site. The internet infrastructure itself is the same, but now we have faster speeds, which means your personal sites can be bigger and less optimized (easier for novices and amateurs to create). People still run webrings, people still have affiliate buttons, there’s other ways to find things than search engines, and there’s other search engines than the big ones anyways.
There are active communities out there that are keeping a lot of the old Internet alive, while also pushing it forward in new ways. A lot of neocities sites are very progressive. If you have an itch for discussion, then publish pages on your website in response to other people’s writings, link them, sign their guestbook.
Email still exists. I have a personal protonmail that I use only for actually writing back and forth to people, I don’t sign up for services with it aside from fediverse ones. People do still run phpbb style forums, too. You’ll find some if you poke around the small web enough.
A lot of these things are not lost or dead. They just aren’t the default Internet experience, they’re hard to find by accident. But they are out there! And it’s very inspiring and comforting.
Thank you for mentioning neocities. I did not stumble over this project until now and I love it!
Its not that there is a shortage of these spaces, its that they are not popular. I’m not sure they ever were popular amongst the general public though, to be fair. Personally I think its okay to have a somewhat small community.
Capitalism
Self hosting and federated social media. Take back control. Fuck the corporations.
It’s so interesting. My partner is still on Reddit and she was complaining to me about the massive amount of bots, trolls and general negativity. My response was basically, yeah, that’s why I left and don’t miss it one bit. I found a much better place that has actual discussion and nowhere near that level of toxicity. I asked her if she wanted to know about it and her answer was just “No”. LOL. She’s also a fan of super drama filled reality TV so I guess if you like one you like the other.
sounds like getting to complain is part of the experience for her, no offense to either of you but i kinda see why reddit suits her lol
Huh… That might be a valid point.
It was capitalism. Proves that they would sell to you the rope to hang them.
Listen, I hate capitalism as much as the next guy, but that’s not the case. Normies ruined the internet, then capitalists latched onto the normies.
Normies ruined the internet
I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the Cyptocurrency freaks, the click bait video game ads, and the endless AI generated slop.
What was this about my dear sweet mother, who can barely check her email anymore because of all this crap, ruining the Internet?
Stop blaming capitalism - people are the problem, not the systems they create.
The average person is a fucking retard and that’s not changing - when they reach a space, it goes to shit.
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Lmao speak for yourself with the “self loathing” label - I hate the rest of y’all because you’re dumb as fuck.
this is exactly what i said to a friend today
actually, in a few years, maybe the young people won’t spend their time on instagram, because it’s all bots anyways. maybe then the young people will enjoy living outside of their screen-devices again, and physical life could get a revival.
I don’t think so. We’ve all been happily having discussions with bots online for a long time now. People just don’t notice that the person they are writing to isn’t a human.
We went from talking in person to talking via computer and no talking with a computer. It’s not getting better.
My feeling is that genAI and capitalism are destroying themselves. Now, all web content that is scraped to feed genAI is poisoned by other genAI. So the quality will get worse, and then people will find other ways to use teh tubes of noise. And then the funding for shit genAI websites will dry up, and some of the remaining web content will still be there, because the rest of us aren’t capitalists.
The problem is that people just accept a continuous drop in quality.
I once had a conversation with an old woman who told me that it would be unheard off for someone with some level of status or self respect to wear ill-fitting off-the-shelf clothing back in the 50s, and nowadays even TV news anchors are wearing cheap off-the-shelf suits.
The same thing applies for everything. When I was a kid, the transition from small, independently owned shops with qualified stuff who’d give you proper consultation to chain stores in malls was just under way. Old people would complain all day that the staff in chain stores had no clue about the stuff they were selling. And yet everyone went to the chain stores in the mall because they had a bigger selection and were cheaper.
And now there’s the same thing happening with the chain stores in malls getting replaced by online shopping, and now not only is there no one to consult you on your purchase, you can’t even trust the product listings because they are riddled with errors.
For a while you could trust reviews, but that time is long gone, but still everyone just happily shops and consumes away, because online shopping is cheaper, there’s a bigger selection and it’s more convenient.
The same process is happening all the time everywhere. Stuff just gets gradually shittier, but we just accept it, because we get used to it.
Lemmy is pretty chill. Combined with a rss feed viewer, a few youtube channel (ff+extension), Nexcloud, and my internet experience is cool. I don’t care about tiktok, instagram and all that shit.
I hate autoplay videos, and I think this feeling of unease when a video autoplays comes from the earlier days of the internet.
It feels unsustainable, right? Like the value of of this tsunami of advertising has to be inflated, especially with bots/agents taking over traffic. People’s tolerance for junk isn’t infinite. At some point the illusion has to crack, and the advertising bubble will pop and burn the internet/app ecosystems down, hopefully…
The people sucking each other’s farts in the marketing industry have no shame. They market themselves first, your product 2nd, and for some reason these cold calculating corporations throw obscene money at them.
I think it must be some good old boy network where the people at the top invest in certain marketing agencies and they use them to leech money out of the companies they work for with little risk of being caught for embezzlement.
GTA 6, one if the top known franchises in the industry, will be spending $500 million+ on marketing.
In comparison, GTA 5 cost about $265 million to release
The budget for marketing has doubled the cost of the entire previous game. Does anyone need ads for GTA6? Wouldn’t just having the devs do livestreams of them playing the game and discussing the tech involved with making GTA6 not create enough hype? Does there even need to be additional hype created?
I just dont buy it. These penny pinching losers that run our world don’t just give away half a billion dollars for a couple trailers and some ads plastered all over the internet and IRL. Marketing looks like shit, smells like shit, tastes like shit. It’s fucking shit. Why buy a $500 million dollar turd unless you were somehow getting a cut?
I don’t remember it that way. To me, it was a minefield of viruses, popup ads, chain mail, and unexpected extreme NFSW content.
Everything improved a bit when browsers started limiting recursive popups and hidden executables on websites, but for much of the late 90s and early aughts, every click was risky. And oh my god the design of things. I was so happy when the <blink> tag finally fell out of fashion.
Yeah I think this is definitely a case of rose colored glasses. I absolutely miss the way the internet was 25 years ago but I also do not miss randomly browsing and running across child pornography, I don’t miss every kilobyte being measured to make sure I don’t over use the network, I don’t miss having to have multiple browsers just because a website was written for Netscape and not Explorer, or pop-up adds, viruses, and everything else you mentioned.
Oh, yeah, the browser wars. As a designer during that time, having to learn 5 or more versions of css and JavaScript (which were sometimes competing and broke one another) before code pages were a thing was a nightmare.
And getting kicked off dial-up because someone decided to make a phone call when a large game download was at 97% complete after 5 hours before file caching was really a thing was infuriating.
you sound like you can help me identify that weird square icon that saves my shit
Do you mean these?
They were part of a continuity ritual we performed before they installed cupholders in computers. You’d have to feed them to your pc one at a time when requested, often whilst entering an incantation in the command prompt. The meaning may have been lost to time, but we still use their icon to honour that ritual.
e: I can’t believe I found these so quickly. They were still on the same closet shelf where I put them in 2002.
I’ll just leave these here…
…raspberry pi 4B for scale 'cos i can’t put by banana next to them, this ain’t the 90s ya know?Came across a bunch that have old backups of someone’s data. Also some 5 1/4". Not sure if magnets or a hammer/scissors is the best security destruction 😆
If you’re concerned about privacy, fire nearly always works.
