And if not what do you expect/want to replace it with. I dont think the whole web being like the fediverse is feasible,since billions of users use the internet
no. Today its a distribution channel für commercial crap, full of cookie terror and paywalled content nobody is asking for. Internet was never free, I always had to pay for an internet connection. But today its ridiculous, now I have to pay to get ads pushed up the…
You are asking this on a platform specifically filled with people who didn’t want to be on those centralized services. :P
That said, not to be the contrarian, but I think this is one of a collection of issues where the problem is not the technology or organizational structure, it’s just capitalism. Generalizing to talk about any monopolies, there are a lot of benefits to centralized production. Economies of scale, not duplicating work/resources, etc. There is a reason why some industries, called natural monopolies, are either run by the government or a private corporation is granted a monopoly over it in a regulated way. The classic example of this is infrastructure like train tracks. You don’t need 5 different train lines going to all the same places and there’s no space for that anyway. So by having one entity run the trains, you get to avoid the problems with that.
Going back to the internet: Centralization has some of the usual benefits of a more general monopoly: If we have one social media site, we don’t need 30 different shitty versions of a video player when the first one worked just fine. But more specifically, it has network effects: The more people who use a site, the more valuable it is for everyone else to use the site. If I go to a site to chat with people and there’s nobody to chat with, there’s not much point in being there. There is a consistent UI so I don’t need to relearn how to navigate different sites. Plus it makes it easier to find what I’m looking for or discover new things.
None of what I described above is directly caused by greedy corporations. Those are just the dynamics that emerge from the material reality of the internet. If we go rid of corporations tomorrow, I think we’d still end up with a decent amount of centralization because of that. Like imagine all of the big social media sites dissipated tomorrow. Everything goes back to being individual sites with their own forums. What happens? I go to a site that has no users, realize it’s dead, and go back to the more populous one. Or perhaps in an effort to make it easier to find everything someone makes a site that links to all the other interesting sites, curated of course because a list of literally everything on the internet wouldn’t be useful. Maybe you add a forum to that site so people could talk about their favorite other sites in one place. The smaller sites where less conversation happens dry up and the big ones snowball until they’re so big that they’re the place to be. Oops we just reinvented Reddit. As much as I’m done with dealing with corporate social media and want to stick with the fediverse or other stuff, it is still just the case that these sites have less people, and therefore less stuff to do, than those bigger sites, so they lack some of the value I got from those. I’m stubborn enough to put up with that out of principle, but for a lot of people, they’re just going to see that they can’t find anyone to talk about their niche hobby they had a subreddit for or whatever and just move on. It’s hard to achieve escape velocity.
THE problem then, is that these sites are controlled by corporations with profit motives. Their goal isn’t to create the best user experience, it’s just to do whatever makes them the most money. If that means psychologically manipulating people to engage more they’ll do that. If that means censoring speech that scares off advertisers, they’ll do that. If it means making the site worse and then selling people the solution, they’ll do that. If it means abusing their position of power to take advantage of creators on these sites who depend on the site, they’ll do that. And because of this centralized position of power with all of it’s inherent monopolistic advantages, they get away with this. Wrest control away from those corporations and find a way to run these centralized sites with democratic control, and most of those problems go away and we get to keep the benefits.
It’s not obvious that there is a good way to achieve this under capitalism though. The fediverse is certainly an interesting experiment in this by allowing there to essentially be independent sites that get collated into one place with a unified standard for UX, but we’ll have to see if they can overcome inertia to reach the critical mass necessary to be a genuine replacement to centralized corporate controlled sites. I also don’t know enough about the technology to know if this is the best solution or not. So I’d be curious to see if this takes off or if people find another solution.
The modern internet is very sterile, sanitised, and boring. It is a hollow and empty shell of what it once was.
Yea but think of how many ads you could fit in that bad boy
You could even host a website where it is just ads, and not only do people pay for the privilege, but other people visit it, like it’s a point of interest.
I like to work 8 hours to earn a living and then spend the next 6 hours I’m awake being subjected to
sales men trying to sell me thingswatching dude perfect
That means you need to get out more.
The old Internet is still out there; it’s just that it is as flaky and hard to navigate as it always has been.
The “modern” Internet is just a select number of services that send each other traffic and run by the algorithm.
Most of the Internet I use in my spare time is stuff that’s been around since the 90s and still has about the same number of users it had then. Some of it is even indexed by search engines.
Could you give some pointers?
Well, browse Google below the SEO dreck. Then follow the links.
Or, find some niche hobby site and follow its links.
Branch out from the world wide web… I still visit Hotline sites, the odd Gopher server, and other protocols of yesteryear.
Browse a few sites in the wayback engine and find linked sites that still exist there.
Or, go a totally different route and browse Tor or I2P.
what it once was.
Very slow connection with inability to find websites,and needing to know every single url?
Lol this is some weird out of touch take if I’ve ever seen one
Ah, yes, I remember those days with the text-only LYNX browser from the unix terminal and the joy of Netscape Navigator on machines that could handle windows. Searching was difficult until there was Alta Vista, which was AMAZING compared to the competition, but even it failed for D&D-style gamers who tried to search for “role playing games” and got back a list of a million sex sites and zero visible pen/paper/dice games. Happily, you could add boolean operator rules to get rid of some of that (NOT sex NOT babes NOT XXX) – but you’d either be typing a lot of naughty words to skip or you’d have to remember the sites that catered to RPGs because searching could be very hit or miss.
Well, yes.
Human curated but now my connection is faster than what some of the sites I visit can serve.
I don’t know how you arrived at this based on what @TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.ca was saying.
Connection strength is a network/infrastructure problem while what was being said in the original comment is an application/usage one.
The other part of your statement can be solved using a search engine which restricts itself to just searches and not distract itself with ads and AI. But evidently such a product is hard to build in today’s world.
Absolutely fucking not.
It’s not an internet. It’s a top-down content filter with a paywall.
It’s not worth the price of admission and I’m paying for it twice already and then being asked to pay a third time to access most of it with advertising on top of it.
I’m unbypassable-android-app-restrictions away from cutting off from the whole goddamn thing.
In some ways yes and in some ways no.
Data and information are now more widely available than ever. Of course, misinformation is also more widely available than ever.
The new web feels devoid of passion/ humanity. Gone are the days of self funded sites that existed “just because”. Now everything has to generate revenue to stay afloat. I do miss the days where it felt special to be on the Internet, whether you were hosting content or observing it.
I despise the centralized web and actively avoid it. Theres still plenty of WEB1.0 oit there, its just gettibg harder to find as years go on. But there are some things I don’t want to go back to, gore and other shock stuff comes to mind.
Posting on forums and finding random websites, GeoCities, tripod, chatting on IRC… These were the days.
I wish I’d never stopped using IRC for chat tbh
The tildeverse is still keeping the old internet alive
I don’t like decentralized web like Lemmy too: I hoped it would be significantly better but it isn’t. Crazy fanatics instead of users and the same Reddit-tier moderators.
I joined Lemmy during the Reddit API change. It was pretty dead on Lemmy but communities were forming and I could have discussions with others, it felt promising. But sadly the reality now is it feels like Lemmy is becoming an echo chamber like Reddit was and conversations are stifled.
In addition to this some people immediately engage others in a negative way, where someone may be misinformed or misunderstood, and rather than offer knowledge or insight they are called fucking idiots.
It doesn’t feel like a community.
Starting to feel like reddit and its low effort crap is starting to make its way here too
its the reddit purges, and shadowbanning, since they have been aggressively doing it, bans the “rightfully ban people that are trolls and spammers/ propagandists” they come here too.
Ugh I mean I know we have block and are encouraged to do it, but there’s only so much I feel like doing. I’m at a point of nearly instant banning any community that sounds copy/paste from reddit
Methinks you guys are hanging out too much on .world. There are other instances out there.
I don’t like it, no. But it won’t be replaced, just like the wild west Internet of yesteryear wasn’t replaced: it’s still where we left it. And so will these behemoths be, when we move past them.
Don’t believe me? Livejournal and mySpace are still running, at the same addresses. Your old login still works.
Myspace servers were wiped clean about 10 years ago. I checked about 3 years ago. My profile, and all my friends profiles were gone.
It’s a music service now.
No clue about live journal. I never had one.
Last I looked my Myspace profile was still there but all the content was gone. That’s somehow worse.
I don’t think keeping the web centralized is sustainable because it used to always been open, free, and decentralized. We can already see the centralization falling apart
Not convinced the masses will go back, they will keep flocking to whatever’s hyped and new. Many countries only know web2.0 as the internet and never experienced the wild west, their world is Facebook and whatsapp
Well, I don’t miss the kiddie porn being dropped into chat rooms and forums randomly like could happen back in the day. But I like having a decent chance of finding whatever product I want/need and a better than zero shot at finding whatever obscure thing I’m interested in on Wikipedia.
There’s tradeoffs. But the old net was a lot more fun.
I dont think the whole web being like the fediverse is feasible
It does not need to be. “Whole web” being a certain way almost implies it all follows the same standards from which point the people who set and develop those standards become the centralised authority.
I like to think of the internet as simply a carrier of digital information. This can be any information. My vpn tunnel is just as much a part of the whole as a public website.
The way i envision a positive evolution is that more people get involved in running their own network, for themselves, their family, their neighbourhood, a global community they are a part of.
They can use the activitypub protocol, a selfmade protocol or any other they want. The only thing that matters is that the people who need and use the digital information can use it.
The public internet dominated by large players will still exist but it will be (and actually already is) a small portion of everything we use the web for.
We deserve an internet that is not merely a surveillance farm for billionnaires and governments.
