A few of us still remembers option 3) Regulation And also 4) Properly working anti-trust laws.

It isn’t just corporations that have ruined everything, it’s spammers and scammers and cybercriminals too. Searching any topic these days is a crapshoot, with a high likelihood of falling into a spammer’s tarpit.

To me it feels like the internet is evolving into a virtual Dark Forest. We float around in these little bubbles of sanity, hiding amid a yawning expanse of seething chaos.

I’ve said before and I’ll say again. I would use the option on amazon for shipping that says “let your employees pee”. I get my package 2-3 days later. Oh well. I don’t give a shit. I’d rather normalize companies treating people like people. And if I get my limited edition pez dispenser 3 days later, so be it.

Not like it’s an oxygen tank.

History tells us there’s also a release valve of a swift brick to the side of the head, one brick per billionaire.

It sounds messier than paying taxes, to me. But I’m not a billionaire, so I can’t say I understand their motives.

im doing 2 actually.

It’s fascinating how the absolute majority of people is trying to solve both social and technical problems at the same time via only social or only technical means. Again and again.

You need both.

Fediverse works right for moderation, but technically communities and users are part of an instance, and an instance is a physical thing that may go down. Just like most of our Web has vanished. And also, of course, it uses Web technologies.

Further my idea as to what should be done about this (one approach is Nostr, unloved here because of people who use it ; I also think it’s too primitive):

The storage must be full p2p. Like Freenet, but probably optimized so that people would only store what they themselves need, and give some space to others in the communities they participate in. Not to all the network, like Freenet, but only to whom they want.

The identities should be “federated”, as in communities allowing moderation. Moderation should be done via signed “delete” records, and users would then not replicate “deleted” information.

This way even when “an instance goes down” (say, instance admin has lost their private key or something like that), its stuff will still be replicated.

One can even make “an instance” inherit another instance (again, instance admin has lost their private key or, say, someone has stolen it), so that its users would replicate that.

One can imagine many mechanisms on top of that. But what’s described would allow libraries and allows a thing similar to DNS (again, like a community, to which you subscribe for naming service that associates names with entities) and a thing similar to a static website, and something like Usenet with user identities, moderation and communities.

Dynamic websites are possible too - but I’m not really knowledgeable about smart contracts and such required for it.

I’m actually describing something in the middle of a few things far smarter people are already doing.

This would allow agility between social and technical solutions.

I’m very much onboard with this. Idk if I’d say it’s the libraries job though, I think it should be at the city level for community instances.

Don’t be silly, the proletariat just needs to unite, seize the nuclear stockpiles of at least two nations capable of destroying all life on earth in defense of the oligarchy’s hoards, and then decentralize ownership of the global communication infrastructure.

Easy.

Love that last line. Will remember.

Yes, selfhost most essential services like mail, messengers, web search, piped frontend, vpn, and other things like gitea/forgejo and jellyfin, web 3.0 will be federated network

TIL - there is something called Gopher and Gemini. Looks interesting, will read more on it.

This pretty much. It got ‘civilized’

I really hate to argue in favor of all those scary things, but with those things in the old west came education and improvements to quality of life; better protections for the vulnerable and cures and prevention of disease.

Same could be said of the internet if we follow the analogy.

Indeed, Reddit was a great example of this. All of the stupid things they tried to pull off in the past few years (selling user data, turning off the API, insulting their users, VPN blocking, to name a few) would have not worked when they were a growing website. Now that they have so many low quality users, they can do that successfully because they know that said users are too dumb to realize how they’re being abused. Even larger websites like Twitter and Facebook operate this way.

The takeaway here is: don’t focus on having many users, focus on having good users. All relationships are a two-way street, and if you’re on the side of the street with too many people, you don’t have any personal leverage on your own. It’s in your best interests to get out of that relationship.

Cyberpunk, let’s go 😂

Someone showed me this and it’s the closest I’ve seen to the way the internet used to be lol

Shows a different site every click

https://wiby.me/surprise/

we’re a smaller part

Quality trumps quantity anytime.

I agree to an extent, but the problem is not so much the normies themselves as it is the massive commercial market they represent. You might point to mainstream social media as evidence of a problem with the people themselves, but you would be overlooking the fact that the surveillance and attention economies have meant these social media platforms are deliberately designed to position people against one another to drive engagement so these companies can charge more to advertisers. Discourse on the internet isn’t getting worse because there are more bad people online, it’s getting worse because companies have a financial incentive to turn us into bad people when we are online.

The normies are not the problem, they are the victims. The abusers are the giant corporation manipulating the masses and monetizing a publicly funded infrastructure for their own gains.

We’re in Eternal September now. Have been for a few decades.

How about BBSs? If you want to spam at 1200 baud, you had better be dedicated.

Return the internet to the pre-“smart” phone era, in which a minimum bar of effort and knowledge needed to be present in order to connect and participate on the web.

Yeah. I think that’s happening now. The public will discover the Fediverse, but I’m not sure if they’ll be welcomed into every community here.

Lemmy is the way to go. Decentralized Communities connected via API.

This only works to a degree. Eventually, the communities that allow people to register most easily and see the most active content become the overwhelming majority of the content on the system. And if these communities don’t do a good job of self-policing, they just become mini-2008-style Reddits, filling up with the same bot accounts and serial assholes and sex pests that degraded the original.

Bigger sites start swamping smaller sites with traffic and overwhelming the capacity of smaller communities, so you get waves of defederation and new Walled Gardens of content.

The issue isn’t the technology, its the participants in that technology. Too many malicious actors piling onto a platform and either corrupting the administration or degrading the quality of content will inevitably lead to enshitification.

Federation only mitigates this by allowing smaller instances to break away and abandon larger ones. It does nothing to screen the sincere and human actors from the malicious and automatic accounts.

Globalization ruined it.

Not like in politics (though similar), but in the sense that instead of a space of generally sane people where you don’t have to follow any conventions of fashion or social expectations of idiots, like a park where people sit in grass and eat sandwiches, it has turned into something like a mall built in place of that park, with guards, ads, bullshit and shopping apes.

There definitely was trash. You just didn’t have to see it. You’d not go to a central recommendations system, like in social nets or search engines. You’d go to web directories and your friends. Like for many things you still do.

Now there’s the fake social pressure of being on corporate platforms. Why fake? Because you still really need and talk to the same amount people you would back then, even fewer.

That fake social pressure was their killer invention. Human psychology is unprepared for critically evaluating the emotions from being able to scroll through half the world of other people right now. They don’t generally use that seemingly easy ability to reach anyone anywhere, while when it was a bit harder, they would, but the fake feeling of having it is very strong.

It’s a mouse trap.