I’ve definitely turned into the paranoid nutcase within my friend group in recent years, I hate that everything is “smart” nowadays requiring an app/internet connection & account, just to do basic things that didn’t require any of that before.
What’s some things currently making you ramble like an old man?
I think about this constantly. I’m constantly very upset about it. I’ve lost friends to cancer and freak accidents, and the loss of the internet is still genuinely the greatest tragedy in my life. The internet is, in large part, nothing more than a series of very customizable and semi-niche subscription packages and big box stores now. VR, particularly VR Chat, is close to/reminiscent of what it used to be like, so I cling to that, Lemmy, piracy, archive.org, and a few other things very tightly, but VR is starting to enter an era comparable to when cable internet started to become commonly available (and full of obnoxious unsupervised children), so it’s on its way out; not to mention the continued attempts to ruin the internet archive, which will be, not hyperbolically, the greatest loss to our species since the destruction of Alexandria.
We had it all, and it got bought out from under us, and there’s nothing to be done about it. People en masse don’t even know what we’re missing. I hate it. I’ll never get over the obsolescence of specialized forums in favor of social media, in particular.
The good thing is that all the bones are still technically sound, and there’s nothing stopping you from renting a VPS for $5 a month and returning to the good old days. The only thing is that you would have to convince others to do the same, which might ironically end up with you posting about it on Facebook to draw attention. Of course some of the more modern features we want now available with all of the open source decentralized goodness we always wanted with the rise of Federate social media but these Tech Stacks are still underactive development and you could argue we should try building something that doesn’t have things like down voting. All hope is not lost and you care and know exactly what you want and you should fight for it
I still make little static sites on occasion. There’s still free options for hosting, I’ve got some on GitHub and used to use netlify til they changed their free tier. Sticking a static site into aws s3 +cloud front is super cheap if you don’t have much traffic. The nice thing is that they run forever without any intervention.