The internet’s fine - the web’s the problem.

ssh, Call of Duty, email, random voice-call software on strange ports - all of them work fine. People have problems with websites.

Plenty of websites of course are fine, the problems present when people use search engines and find a bunch of guff written by a bot, Paywalls, and sign-up screens.

They say the best way to predict the future is to create it, so if you want to help there, ‘make good art’, write and share good content, don’t feed the machine. Sounds like you’re doing that already if you’re on Lemmy.

And if you want to check out a quieter corner of the internet, where things aren’t all in-your-face-sing-up-click-here-now-NOW-DOIT…download the lagrange browser and check out Gemini. It’s a mostly plain-text protocol, where people read and write, and sometimes share whacky music.

The internet hasn’t changed and is still the same Internet from the 90s. We’re all still using TCP/IP to communicate. A networked device using this protocol from 1993 would have no issue connecting to a network from 2023 (media conversion and bridging of the physical layer might be needed, but the point remains).

The problem is that everyone decided to congregate around the same four websites and the same web browser. You can, you know, stop using them anytime and seek alternatives RIGHT NOW that still exist. You’re here already, so that’s a start.

Seems like all we need is a search engine that only returns sites that don’t shove unwanted content down your throat. Tall order though.

Much of the old web is still there. A lot of old sites have gone dark, but there are still some that remain, and some have persisted for surprisingly long.

Usenet and IRC still exist! As public and distributed services, like the Fediverse and the World Wide Web itself, one node can go down but others remain. Things that don’t remain? AOL IM; Yahoo Messenger; MSN Messenger; Google Talk (in its original form).

When everyone chased after social media, many people declared the old web dead. They were wrong. When mobile platforms hit it big, a lot of people thought the days of the desktop PC were gone. They were wrong too. The demise of Google Reader was an attempt to kill off RSS, but a lot of sites still have feeds. And a lot of blogs still exist, even if it’s getting harder to find them due to Google Search’s ongoing decay.

Corporations have big PR budgets, and a lot of tech reporters are uncritical about what they hype. Witness the attempts to get cryptocurrency, NFTs, and now LLMs, to take. But we do not have to buy what they’re selling.

We don’t need a new internet. The old one survives, for now at least. But we have to remember it exists, and make it easier to find.

At the end of the day you just create websites without trackers. Plenty of sites like it exist.

There’s simply not enough demand for it. The majority of people simply don’t care.

The Internet is actually very fine and alternatives to the big guys will keep popping up.

For tracking in general there are several options like pihole, adguard and NextDNS on a DNS level, Firefox/Orion browsers, Proton / Mullvad etc VPN and services.

For search I’ve been fairly happy with DuckDuckGo for some years, but not swears by Kagi.

What is gone is the early days of the seventies / early eighties with free servers at universities accessible to anyone. It doesn’t scale.

Various models tried to figure it out until we got what we’ve had for the last 10 years, “free” services where you are the product.

What you won’t get going forward is free services that gives you what you want without also tracking and collecting data on you and using it for ads etc.

What you can get is high quality services that you choose to pay for.

For now, a fair bit of them is niche and sort of expensive. Hopefully that will expand to giving is fairly broad service coverage from providers that are mostly crowd funded and open.

With blackjack and hookers?

There’s no need for a new internet. Every garbage service has a somewhat viable alternative.

You have peertube instead of youtube Kagi, duckduckgo, marginalia, etc instead of Google search Lemmy instead of reddit Mastodon, polycentric instead of twitter Gitea instead of github Bandcamp instead of spotify There are probably more things but you get the idea. The problem is not the internet itself but that you have to have many people go to objectively less polished or paid services to protect their personal data. I don’t know how that would happen since honestly, the privacy shit doesn’t affect people’s everyday lives, but using different services does affect their lives.

BBSes are making a comeback. This time over telnet. They’re just as great as they used to be.

The internet is much larger and diverse than the World Wide Web

Tor/Darkweb, Freenet, LoRAWAN are all the alternate internets I can think of off the top of my head. The difficulty is generally the “network effect”. 1 Fax machine is useless, 10000 are very useful. Similiarly, an alternate internet with one website isn’t all that interesting.

As someone familiar with the OSI model, this thread is a bit confusing since the Internet to me is really the infrastructure on top of which all of your fancy sites and apps are built. When you say “the Internet”, I’m thinking about TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, etc.

That said, I’m pretty sure most people here are just taking about websites at L7, although there are arguments for change at the other layers.

I think what’s more realistic to happen is that internet will be split into two and after certain websites and services become unuseable to people who care about privacy and such, then new alternatives will just emerge along the more popular ones. Kinda like Lemmy.

Stop using google products and maybe start using a vpn if security is super important to you? It’s fairly easy, believe me. DuckDuckGo, Firefox, it’s all there.

I think it is possible under the right circumstance. For example let’s say internet disappeared tomorrow. I think what would likely happen is local areas would start to connect.

It would start would smaller groups and slowly integrate more and more until you had the internet back.

I remember watching some sort of video, maybe it was a Vice bit, I don’t remember. They were in Cuba at this massive apartment building complex. Let’s say like 1,000 people lived there.

They didn’t have regular access to internet - they need to purchase credits from state store to use the internet. But many people have computers and want to play multi-player games even though they couldn’t afford the internet credits.

So what they do? Create a localized network between the entire complex so every person could connect, share files, share games, play games, etc. You have a mini-internet between all members of a community.

That’s all the internet is - networks connected to networks and done at the global scale. So is it possible to create another? Absolutely. Although you need some sort of incentive to do it, otherwise nobody will bother. The Cubans had an incentive, but I’m hard pressed to find a reason one would want to in the US these days. You never know, though.