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I’m reminded of the video game Disco Elysium (spoilers ahead).
Welp, two paragraphs in and done with this blog I guess.
I’ve actually started to enjoy internet more recently. I went back to IRC, found a nice network with a wholesome community which is growing all the time. Recently added a phpbb based forum, which is not very active yet but thats more because its fairly new. Lots of self hosting enthusiasts there, I’ve learned a bunch. Spent the last few weeks setting up Jellyfin and Navidrome for my dad to use, so he doesnt have to deal with repeats on the Telly or pay for stupid subscriptions. I did the navidrome with a old laptop, I put in a headless Debian and use it through SSH on my Fedora. A year ago I barely knew how to do “sudo apt install”, without this community I wouldnt have been able to do any of it. For the first time in 15 years, I’m enjoying my time online. Like properly enjoying.
So its not about internet being ruined, its about finding that spot that you can enjoy. Let people rot their brains in tiktak and facetagram, you find yourself a nice community of like minded people. It takes some effort, but the communities are there. And if they are not, make one yourself.
Also you are using piefed.social which aggressively filters out AI content, the topic of the article.
And I love you for that :)
It really makes a big difference.
I’ve greatly reduced my Mastodon usage because of the daily “oh shit this link goes to AI slop again, sigh, close tab” experience. It’s such a drag.
Yeah thats one of the reasons I enjoy a smaller community with the IRC network and forum I was talking about. Its so much nicer to converse when you know its a person on the other side of the screen. I spend more time and effort on responses when I know the user already, at least on some level. With reddit and mastodon its more like “send whatever, turn off notifications” type of deal.
Though with reddit even thats coming to an end, rumor is they gonna finally axe old.reddit. I’m sort of holding out until then, the formula1 sub is quite valuable for me still, even though even that place is full of morons now. With Mastodon I never got off the ground. I log in like once a month, if that, read a couple of posts and then log off again. Maybe its because I mainly use it with my phone, I dont remember my password and the mobile browser is the only place where its saved hahah
The internet isn’t the internet anymore. It’s walled off, corporatized, and exclusionary.
The internet used to be for people.
Now it’s for profit.
Humanity may never see anything like the 90s-2000s era again. That was a distinct milieu of nearly unbound creation and discovery. Not only did corporations remained skeptical of the internet. People were highly averse to being manipulated because the internet was untrustworthy. Paradoxically that’s what made the internet trustworthy. Once trust was established of course. It was a perfect mix of factors that made it a unique period in history.
Learning about the world through 500-character snippets, or 30-second videos, is not a serious way to engage with knowledge.
Just don’t consume it. Same for blogs.
It’s like junk food. It’s not going away, so just don’t consume it.
yeah, but you get socially isolated if you don’t consume it.
just like 30 years ago if you turned up your nose at mcdonalds everyone thought you were an asshole, because it was considered great thing and only weirdos would not eat there.
further all of this bleeds over into your real everyday life.
If you feel the need to eat McDonald’s because of what other people think, then you have worse problems.
so being a dick about mcdonalds and having no friends, is better than having friends and not being a dick about mcdonalds?
and we wonder why gen z is so lonely… maybe because they’d rather be alone with sticks up their ass than remove the stick, eat the mc, and just have fun and make friends with people.
The undernet is growing as the overnet is bloated and dying of it’s own poison.
And what would the undernet be? This Lemmy here?
Check out Neocities, it’s a revamp of the old Geocities platform.
All individual small sites, in the style of the late 90’s-early 2000’s web. Tons of animated gifs, sparkling cursors, hand-crafted HTML and CSS, web rings, shrines and fan pages, etc.
Very fun to just click random pages and explore, just like back in the day before search engines and algos curated our feeds and content for us.
Here’s a direct link to the gallery. Scroll and blindly pick one with your finger with your ur eye closed
Oh man! Its been so long since I have seen geocities like sites. This is going to be a great rabbit hole, thank you.
Holy shit, that sounds good and will look into it. Thanks!
Maybe all this bullshit is a needed step to bring back old internet
We need forums back… the fediverse is a good start in my book.
Everything gets enshittified - Capitalised, and nothing good ever comes out of those leeches and parasites.
The Capitalist religion crushed a new global, free and open digital community landscape. Say loud and proud: ‘thank you Capitalist believer’, for how it looks and works today…
I hope that we’ll collectively decide that it’s rude to pass off LLM writing as your own, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
We won’t unless we stop the source perpetuating this “culture.”
Big Tech.
Unfortunately, they kinda have a grip on everyone’s information sphere, so I think our chances are low :(
It’s a good post, I agree with it. And I guess The Pale is a good description of what we are noticing.
I got to experience the internet before it became like this, so at least I have memories of greatness. But the desire for great profits ruins everything. Not only the internet but the world.
Greed for excessive amounts of money is the root of evil, the bible got that right. But humans are not aware enough to see a future where greed is not the driving force of society.
Humansbillionaires are not aware enough
Can we make a new internet?
We here on the fediverse are currently trying to build it.
yeah, but fedi has lots of baked in issues, especially a virulent userbase that is glad to use bots and other tools to turn fedi not into a liberal space but an illiberal space full of extremist and exclusionary politics. they are bringing over their social media echo chamber stuff and just try to re-create it here rather than on commercial platforms where they were kicked out of or left due to censoring of their extremism.
the issue is a large section of the userbase here isn’t like 2000s tech libertarians, that founded most of the internet and the 'net culture we are nostalgic for… a lot of that mentality is essentially extinct or viewed as toxic now. recall that reddit never had a block feature until 2016… 11 years after it started and only when Donald Trump was already in office.
hell most of the devs who are building the fedi are different flavors of political extremists themselves… and there are already many scandals/debates over how many fedi projects have baked in controls or default settings to censor and block things.
more than the internet, the world itself and it’s viewpoints are fundamentally different from where they were 20-30 years ago. we had much more of a monoculture and a narrower overton window back then. the type of stuff that goes on cable news programs these days would have been un-airable 20 years ago.
even in using reddit from 2010-2015, there was a massive tonal shift as the site grew, and it became massively more miserable as the politics flooded the site and every other subreddit became people fighting over R vs D.
Yes, we can!
Be the change you want to see!
Together, we can make it better!!!
I’ll be the motivator for the team, all we’re missing are the programmers. Or wait, should we vibe-code it?
Tap for spoiler
I am sincerely sorry about the vibe code comment. I threw up in my mouth when I read it out loud. I’m sorry.
I don’t know who are they, but they could just curate their online experience by looking for something that is actually organic and genuine, and drop their anchors on that.
Not a bad post and has some good points but I think they’re reacting to broader social changes. Not just the Internet. That mentioned co-workers, and that to me indicates a broader issue.
Try to look at it as the chapter of the internet as we know it is over. I feel the same way as this author but I hold out hope innovation will happen.
Someone will fill the void. How and when it happens remains to be seen. There was a time not too long ago when it was unfathomable for people to have computers in their pocket.
The simpsons will probably predict it.
Same… I tried Kagi small web which kinda promised to fix it but so far every page is a hyper-focused version of everything I hate. It somehow made it even worse.
I think it can’t really solve the problem because the people that want that tight nit free and open. Internet are already retreating from engaging with whatever this is.
People have repeatedly called things “Web 3.0” but I think we’ve legitimately made it finally and I hate it.