I’m seeing an incredible turn towards the kind of organic platforms of the 1.0 web world. They may never hit the same level of popularity as the commercial platforms like Facebook and Twitter did, but these new platforms like Lemmy, Mastodon, and others are letting us build a new space.
Probably the best part is that so much of it is built on FOSS meaning that the monetization and enshitification by investors will have a much harder time taking root.
FOSS is like penicillin honest to god…
Meta is already trying to destroy the Fediverse.
They can try but they’ll never be able to reach all instances that defederates from them. Meta and the rest of the fediverse will be like two non-overlapping ecosystems.
No, that would be impossible.
No, the platforms are enshittifiying, but the underlying nuts and bolts of the internet are still there untouched and so far every attempt by big tech to enshittifiy/proprietarize those has thus far failed
Self hosting:
The search engines don’t do what they used to do. New sites cannot gain traction without million dollar advertising budgets.
Meh, fuck the search engines, let’s bring back webrings!!
So… I’m not sure if this is an entirely rational thought.
I’d always wanted to do ham radio but hadn’t bothered. Before my time, ham radio let you do amazing things that weren’t otherwise very easy. Like have a group chat with a bunch of people all over the world. Except when I was looking for things to do, you could get on the Internet and chat with a bunch of people all over the world … without the antennas and hardware and all.
Lately some stuff happened and my spouse’s friend who lives near Asheville NC and lived through the flooding there where ham radio was the only working form of communications, so my spouse got pressured into buying a radio, which means that I got myself a license because … well, radio works without much infrastructure?
Mostly I figure I needed to fill the void that was getting on Twitter if something happened locally.
I also want to get into ham radio and have been messing with sites like this to scratch the itch for now.
I feel like smartphones have just made people “internet lazy” - myself included. The masses just want to get an app and let it accomplish whatever you need, without worrying about any kind of enshitification as long as it’s free.
But you’re here, so that’s a good sign.
I hate apps and refuse to use them in almost all cases, unless they’re FOSS or collect little to no data.
“free”
Younger people I talk to have absolutely normalized “I saw this on Instagram!” As a way of shopping.
There’s an app for that!
I’m starting to feel like the Cyberpunk 2077 version of the internet is not too far-fetched. It’s split into 2 parts:
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The “old net” - This has been completely overrun by AI programs that are so fast and powerful they almost immediately compromise any non-AI powered system that connects to it.
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The “net” - Blocked off from the old net by the “Blackwall” (a big firewall that keeps all AI out) is basically your standard internet that humans use via cybernetic implants.
I honestly could see AI basically filling the internet with so much garbage and malware that it becomes completely unusable. This is already starting to happen. However, if we create a new one with just human-controlled computers, I don’t see how we could stop people from just connecting AI to that one.
I don’t see how we could stop people from just connecting AI to that
In lore, Netwatch handled that. If you mess around with an AI they come shoot you in the head and pour water on its power supply.
Probably for the best.
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So the answer is no but only because the web is only one part of the internet. Someone somewhere will create a new protocol that we never thought off and start a new service and no I’m not taking about the web3 scam and crypto. Stuff like gemini and tildeverse are pockets of the 90s internet. Still alive and kicking.
You’re asking that question in one of the places where it will be evolving. The fediverse, or something like it, is the future of the internet.
Well we’re literally in the middle of rolling out http3 so tech will never stop teching.
If you pine for the old internet spin up a BBS or PHPBB and enjoy some arcane discussions - those things still exist and hosting costs are cheaper than ever so if you pop 200 bucks into an account you can keep it going for decades.
There are plenty of active forums these days still on specific topics. Most work well on mobile too. I personally frequent about 4 different ones and using Hermit app makes it a great experience.
It’ll still ‘evolve,’ just not in a pro-user way.
The internet isnt a person or thing. Its a giant network and its literally whatever the nodes on the network want it to be. Thats why we are here having this discussion on lemmy.
The internet is so many different things all at once, you can’t really generalize it or say the whole thing is being enshittified.
I think we all just learned a hard lesson about trusting companies where we are the product rather than the customers. People were very naive in the early days of social media, and advertising.
Every time someone spells it with a single ‘t’, my mind pronounces it as shite instead of shit.
Never say never. Once the VCs wake up and realize there is no ROI left they will take their billions out of the pool and 90% of companies will struggle to actually create value from a hostile userbase.
I think 90% of the AI investments really have no commercial viability and are being developed for VC investments.
The internet, no. World Wide Web, unlikely. Commercial domains however have been shit and will continue to enshittify as long as people support their business models.
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