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.
Yeah but the beautiful thing about the fediverse is that instance admins can just be like “lol no, fuck you” and defederate, and moreover coordinate to blacklist anything affiliated with Meta et al.
And then there’s people like me who, as a result of the election, have started to think about how they could go work for tech in the context of some sort of fifth-column effort, because I fucking HATE the amount of societal damage these hypercapitalist megacorps are doing. But of course I would only do that in Minecraft.
Agree, but I fear they try to get those apps banned, similarly to what happened to tiktok (yes I know it’s not FOSS) because the only reason why it was banned was because it was killing the revenue of FB and Twitter.
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
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!!
Never could.
They absolutely could. I built several of them back in the day.
Self hosting:
Let’s go back to dialup and BBS forums over cmd
I’m down but much of the landlines have been converted to VOIP and won’t handle dialup any more :(
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!
It’ll still ‘evolve,’ just not in a pro-user way.
This ‘death of the Internet’ talk really irritates me. It’s not. Stop using the big websites and look for or make your own corner in the Internet.
Part of the death of the Internet involves the creation of spam and being unable to find the good smaller sites.
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.
You say that like we didn’t see people closing their Reddit communities and moving them to Discord.
We ain’t learnt shit.
I use discord but i can’t stand it as a platform for discussion. Forums, even reddit, seem so superior to me as a format for discussion and storing information. Maybe I haven’t figured out discord yet
I don’t think there’s much to figure out.
It’s IRC, TeamSpeak and a Wiki, wrapped up behind a custom web UI.
And everyone is going to be so surprised when those investors start demanding their returns, and everybody’s content gets stuffed behind a paywall.
Cool so it actually sucks, it’s not my incompetence
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.
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.
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.
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.
They’ve ensured the opposite IMO
Never is a long time
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 to suck up clueless venture capital.
See the enshitified hotspots as fly traps for the limp minded. An authentic, simple, commerce free web is still out there, one just needs to look outside of the drivel served up on page one of mainstream search engines
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.
