Everyone lamenting this needs to check out neocities, or even get into publishing your own website. Even if it’s on a “big evil” service like GoDaddy or AWS, whatever. As long as it’s easy for you. Or learn to self host a site. The internet infrastructure itself is the same, but now we have faster speeds, which means your personal sites can be bigger and less optimized (easier for novices and amateurs to create). People still run webrings, people still have affiliate buttons, there’s other ways to find things than search engines, and there’s other search engines than the big ones anyways.
There are active communities out there that are keeping a lot of the old Internet alive, while also pushing it forward in new ways. A lot of neocities sites are very progressive. If you have an itch for discussion, then publish pages on your website in response to other people’s writings, link them, sign their guestbook.
Email still exists. I have a personal protonmail that I use only for actually writing back and forth to people, I don’t sign up for services with it aside from fediverse ones. People do still run phpbb style forums, too. You’ll find some if you poke around the small web enough.
A lot of these things are not lost or dead. They just aren’t the default Internet experience, they’re hard to find by accident. But they are out there! And it’s very inspiring and comforting.
Its not that there is a shortage of these spaces, its that they are not popular. I’m not sure they ever were popular amongst the general public though, to be fair. Personally I think its okay to have a somewhat small community.
Yes, I like it smaller! Ideally you have a sort of fractal structure of a bunch of smaller, tighter communities, which are also bound up in larger but looser communities. Then you can get the benefits of broad exposure and resource sharing from large communities, as well as the benefits of meaningful individual engagement and respectful kinship from smaller communities. I think that personal sites along with forums and the rest of the Internet really can do a great job of bringing this about.
As with many things, the responsibility ultimately lies on the individual to protect themselves and resist falling into bad patterns. Most primarily, maintaining your small community takes effort, and it’s much easier to just be a passive part of a very large community that subsists on infrequent uninvested involvement from many people. It’s even easier to be part of a “community as a service” like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. where all the incentives behind community building responsibilities have been supplemented with real income or fame. But of course then the people making posts, suggesting ideas, steering trends, managing communities, etc. are all in it for reasons that are not necessarily aligned with the well-being of community members. Hence the platform becomes a facade of a healthy community. Really good community upkeep seems to need to be done out of a love for the community, and any income you collect is to support that, rather than the other way around. But love for a community is often not sufficient fuel to power someone to serve huge groups out of the goodness of their heart, when they don’t even know 99% of the members. Not to mention that even if someone really is that altruistic and empathetic, the time and resources become unfeasible. So ultimately, a fractal model or an interleaved model seems to be the only one that could work.
Don’t get me wrong. Large communities are awesome in their own ways and have their own benefits. They have more challenges, though. Ultimately the best way to build a good large community is by building a good small community.
Would you say all of that is true for communities outside in the real world? Ive a theory that groups can become so large the negatives nearly always outweigh the positives but I haven’t really had time to think it through entirely.
I always look back to the 1960s visionaries and their charmingly naive ideas about the future use of computers.
I suspect that if they could have seen the actual future they would have become plumbers.
Rage bait attention seeking absolutely was a thing back then, it was just severely limited and localized.
On the early days of the internet, I found a website about a comic I like. I emailed the person who made the website. I told them that I liked the site, and I sent them a game that I’d made (which had nothing whatsoever to do with the comic or their site). They tried the game and said it was fun…
That kind of interaction can never happen any more. Money has ruined it. Scams and monetization, everywhere, making everything into manipulative toxic sludge.
Why do people never mention anything other than YouTube? DailyMotion is trash now but was around then. Veoh was another good one. There were so many other video streaming platforms before YouTube’s reign. Some forums still exists. Before Spotify, there was several music streaming platforms also and I’m not talking about LimeWire. playlist.com was legit before and GrooveShark was the Spotify before they decided to kill it off because couldn’t profit. So many cool things before capitalism ruined them (e.g. Skype).
We need to just ban advertising. The free with ads model is toxic to humanity.
Ads are fine relatively speaking. Its the data brokers that are the real problem
Data brokers wouldn’t exist without ads. The whole reason companies collect info on people is to better manipulate them into buying products.
Pardon me, but Friendster was for friends - Myspace was for tricking people into listening to Nickelback.
Goatse is what killed friendster imo
You’re the man now, dog!
We all lost our innocence back then. We stared into the void, unable to look away. You remember how we all were.
And napster was for taking naps! Until metallicock ruin it.
The Internet was even better before 2001. Around 2002 is when paywalls started becoming a thing along with the increased enforcement of the DMCA.
Yeah, I remember when I first got access to the internet in the 90s and it was mostly forums and whatnot run by hobbyists. Finding stuff was a bit tricky, but Yahoo was largely usable to find stuff. Wikipedia didn’t exist, but encyclopedia brittanica or whatever was a thing and worked somewhat okay online. Pictures bigger than a thumbnail loaded like a slideshow on dialup, but text was responsive, and text-based online games were becoming more and more common.
Yahoo search? Alta Vista ftw
Lycos was also pretty rad.
Feels like we’re all old men whose country was conquered
That’s a surprisingly good way to put it!
It’s a bit more nuanced. Trolling and ragebait absolutely was a thing, but there was still a certain sense that it was just part of the Wild West nature of the internet. Someone posting racist garbage on a phpBB would be a minor irritant that would catch a bit of flak but be otherwise ignored.
These days it’s entire office blocks full of professional trolls armed with advanced analytics, profiling systems and AI paid to push political agendas. And the most frustrating part of it is that despite the fact that everyone knows this to be true, it’s still working anyway and we have elected officials of ostensibly Developed countries repeating obvious bullshit they saw online.
Trolls actually saw themselves as an art from. Everyone else saw them as annoying cretins.
I agree with your comment.
People had thicker skins too and IRC’s
/ignorewas used.
People now whimper over anything and can’t seem to know how to block others.
The fediverse is similar enough for me :)
I think those old forums dedicated to discussions and interests are still there. The internet has been urbanized and now most people live in large cities, but some people still live in small towns in the countryside.
Gemini is trying to bring that back.
Although it may not be technically the best approach, the 56k vibe is there.What are your favorite capsules? My favorite is Ploum.
Whenever i dip my nose it’s a rabbit hole and it’s 1h to get up to go to work, so… no fav yet…
I’m so old I remember webrings.
It really doesn’t need to be this way.
At any time, we can decide to open our own blog for $9 a year. At any time we can choose to ditch algorithmic socials.
If we don’t like them, we don’t need to use them, and just switch off.
you can publish independently, but it’s hard to get found. Search engines are cluttered with nonsensical link farms these days :-(
We all found our way to Lemmy, and we can start building from here.
It wasn’t easy getting found in the 2000s as well
I miss stumbleupon. Was a great way to find random niche stuff like that back in the day.
It isn’t the same but https://kagi.com/smallweb is kinda in the spirit of it.
and that was a bad thing. it’s bad now, too.
Advertise here, right? Build small communities. How many readers do you even want? I mean that seriously, too. Maybe you would be happy with 100 people who subscribe to your RSS feed, depending on your goals.
it’s also about the perspective of the one looking for information. how do I find the info I search?
Blogger is free I think - though a domain name will cost ya. I’ve thought about doing this for a while. Back to blogging. Seems so therapeutic.
take a look at neocities.org
Looks very cool! I like the relaxed vibe.
