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As we know it? It already has several times. How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer? The centralized oligarchcentric web that we know today needs to die and great new things are coming along to take its place. Returned to more sustainable collaborative websites and services. Like the fediverse.
The only solace I take in the enshittification of the web and the resulting rise in prices, is that we might see (be forced into) a return to the small web and an escape from the stranglehold that big tech and social media has had on us for the last 15 years.
If we’re lucky, the late-stage capitalism effect of ruining companies long term futures for short term gains might happen to entire industries instead of companies.
I see a lot of potential for it to push people back to the small web too. Lots of people becoming interested in personal blogs lately, decentralized social media, the whole indie web movement, etc.
Just started mine! In plain html/txt. Just for fun. Eventually get rss up and running.
Hell yeah! I’ve been blogging for a couple years but I just use Micro.blog. I’d like to switch to something completely self hosted one of these days though.
nice! I took a look at all the options…
and decided that its all too much. wordpress get hacked daily. writefreely wouldn’t install. And some of the other centralized services kinda suck. So im back to old: nginx with a director filled with txt files haha.
Ill publish as time goes on and by interest. Ill take a look at micro.blog too. But im thinking I might create a neocities at some point just for the fun of it.
Neocities isn’t a bad option tbh. I haven’t used it in a minute but if you’re thinking about neocities I really really liked bearblog.dev too!
I just spun up my own Ghost blog, being self-hosted and interacts with the Fediverse. Plus it’s pretty without me needing to know how.
I’ve been really curious about Ghost lately! I set it up in a container on pikapods not too long ago but I ended up staying on Micro.blog. Something I really liked that I had no idea about beforehand was that they have their own little Discover feed over there right? It felt too serious for me when I mostly run an old school link/microblog kinda blog and it seems SO optimized for mailing lists and subscribers
I got 1gbps internet (symmetrical) and a raspberry pi cluster… running my own Wordpress never made more sense… AND that botch should scale!
I’ve been seeing a slow but steady movement that direction too
You got links? Ive been working on something that fits right into this, too. It’s time, y’all.
Definitely. The conditions that created this version of the web have been gone for some time now. We’ve gone from connections that were temporarily and required hours to download a few minutes of postage stamp sized video. To always on connections capable of streaming multiple HD streams faster than real time in both directions.
For my part I’m also looking in to purchasing and trying to set up a small Adhoc mesh Halow network and running a few services on it for myself and any others in the neighborhood that are interested. A small, free (after the hardware) anarchist wireless network. 16mbps can do a lot with simple services, etc.Plus, if a number of people in the area decided to adopt and contribute more nodes to the mesh, you could go faster still.
That sounds like a fantastic way to go. You might also look at meshtastic.
It’s a much different use case, being for text messaging and stuff like that only. But, while it may be low bandwidth, it’s still incredibly interesting.
https://reticulum.network/ is also pretty good for small info packets. Does a LOT more than meshtastic…but its VERY difficult to set up. Or at least it was for me.
Its a pipe dream but having small internet without a major ISP would be fantastic. But it will never happen as it is. Friends are thinking of creating a meshnet though just for fun.
Yes, the bandwidth would be the damper there. It’s great for transmitting just a little bit of data, long distances. But for any sort of bigger data we transmit regularly on phones and desktop. It becomes unfeasible, even low resolution images.It definitely has a range benefit, though that’s for sure.I think fellow Missourian Jeff Geerling had a video out a while back where he talked about using it to contact people below his flight on the way to open sauce.
I jumped on Meshtastic but found it got too congested with noise in a medium-sized city making it difficult to get much out there. Switched to Meshcore and have had a much better time communicating. Seattle’s full on made it equivalent to SMS, which makes me jealous. But YMMV 🤷🏼♂️
How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer?
Gopher predated the Web.
I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I’m not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with
<em></em>,<a href=""></a>, and<h1></h1>anymore, for example.That depends on how you define the web. If you only call the web the web when it was named the web and not what it was before it was named the web. Then yes you’re correct that was before the web. The question is, is that a semantic or significant difference? ARPANET was still a web of interconnected systems. For an old goober like myself.who was using FidoNet net back in the mid 80s. And the actual internet in the late 80s, early 90s. I definitely remember Gophering on the Internet. Plenty of places still maintained gopher directories till the mid 90s.
BBS ARE THE WEB GUYS
<blink>Welcome to my web page under construction</blink>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
The 90-minute live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS, which demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing, including windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.
In 1968
Why Gofer when Gemini?
I still think the web took a wrong turn when NCSA Mosaic first stated supporting inline images.
Gemini space baby! What’s old is new again.
I questioned Reddit doing so, and now we’ve got it on the Threadiverse. There are privacy issues unless your home instance is proxying images for you.
Fuck yes.
I sympathize, but Gopher is designed against hypertext (inline links in text). It is impossible to have e.g. Wikipedia transmitted over Gopher.
I would argue that’s not quite correct. You can absolutely transfer HTML files over gopher, but you’re not going to be viewing it in the gopher program.It was very much designed to be what most people would be more familiar with in concept as an FTP server today, almost. Pretty much all you could view in app were plain text files. and no links between. Everything else was a directory of files to be downloaded.
Gemini is definitely a bit of an inbetween. It does allow for linking between documents, but otherwise keeps everything simple and small, much like Gopher did.
I much prefer browsing the web instead of 2-clicking within each FTP path. (If you built a client to 2-click that for you then that’s just the HTTP web with extra steps.)
Impossible? gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/1
on mobile rn, how well does that do inline links?
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Long ago, when I first got on the Internet, the big social media forum was Usenet. It was a distributed network of instances where users would have an account on a particular instance, where they could subscribe to “newsgroups” dedicated to particular topics. Their instance would broadcast their posts to a newsgroup to all the other instances that were following that newsgroup, so everyone could interact even if they were on different instances.
Then the World Wide Web grew, and centralized sites like Digg and Reddit appeared that handled the same sort of social media. Usenet faded. It’s still around, I suppose, though these days last I checked it’s largely a mechanism for distributing pirated files.
Someday those centralized sites might also fade. Who knows, maybe a decentralized system like Usenet might grow again to replace it?
The wheel turns.
So Usenet was the first fedi site? Reassuring that the concept predates the current paradigm and still has legs, however niche it is atm.
I mean, sort of? It was decentralized because that was just the nature of the early net, rather than a conscious choice to avoid governments and corporations censoring you. They simply didn’t have anything like the net we have today.
That’s fair. I forgot briefly that fediverse has that political side lol but meant more the technology of “broadcasting” and inter-site communications. Seems a better comparison than email at least.
Yeah, Usenet was structured that way more for practical reasons than political ones. Local users were truly local, as in you usually connected to a server that was geographically close to you. Often it was on the same university campus you were on. The long-distance connections between servers didn’t have the bandwidth for everyone to just be freely hopping around browsing whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, at least not at first, so mirroring the content was a better approach. It also made things much more reliable, the servers didn’t need 100% uptime.
Usenet was a lot more “trusting” in its structure. The newsgroups didn’t have moderators per se, and they weren’t hosted by specific instances; they were more just a “tag” you could add to a post to let people filter which subjects they were interested in seeing. There was a globally agreed upon list of newsgroups and a distributed system for creating new ones, but it was all pretty informal. Wouldn’t work well in the current Internet, it’d get spammed to death in seconds. But on the surface level it really felt a lot like the modern Fediverse does, with subject-specific groups and threaded discussions and such.
…and YouTube is one of the major reasons. The web’s not a fucking TV and if you’re using it as a TV you’ll get stupid even faster than from watching actual TV.
I get what the video is saying, but I don’t see this as a bad thing. We moved on from many of those services because we found better ways to do things, or at least ways that we liked more. And when we move on from the services we use now, it’ll be because we once again found something we liked better.
The internet has died several times, but each time it came back in some new way that had adapted to the new ideas and ways we came up with on how to interact with each other. I’m sure when it dies next, we’ll replace it with something that better fits our changing wants and needs.
And hopefully, when that time comes, it’s something much more decentralized and resilient against governments and corporations meddling and censoring us.
Aside: what’s the gist of this channel? I’m not really familiar with it but the last few things I’ve seen of it appear to be two brothers communicating to each other via vlogs?
The Green brothers are interesting and thoughtful. They try to be an overall positive influence on the internet, even aside from their vlogbrothers thing.
just general vlogs about their interests
im ded guys
*This comment will eventually become accurate.
