…smaller communities
So like it was before the dawn of Reddit and social media?
Sign me the fuck up. I miss my dumb little websites with a dodgy layout full of terribly cropped gifs.
But how will we find any of these small sites with the dogshit search is lately.
Webrings, index pages, pure chance
I firmly believe that connecting people to their IRL friends is an important part of the potential of the Internet, as it is shown by Facebook, for example.
But I also believe there are people looking to connect with new people and finding a community where they can express themselves wholly. I think the current Internet is weak in this regard, weaker than it has been before, but I think it’s possible to build a place where people can connect.
Pretty much. I should be able tobmake friends with any human on earth with an internet connection. That this is still hard is something we need to fix
I have a friends Discord I set up a year before Covid, and for about a year only 3 people used it, mainly to play some games together.
But when Covid hit, it obviously gained some traction. And now it’s THE place I interact with friends since I’ve long ditched the likes of Facebook.
I keep going back and forth on whether or not to possibly set up a Mastodon server for friends. The hardest part would be convincing people to use it. But it could just be like our little shared space that could still interact with the wider world. It’d be kinda cool to have a Local feed be just people you know in real life.
A small friend group is best suited for chat programs (discord et al.) But if you want to expand the group a mastodon server is a good idea
So the past of the internet?
The original web 3 was supposed to be a return to form of web 1, with the good stuff of web 2 and decentralized. Then cryptobros hijacked it
Yes and, We’re taking it back.
https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse/how-to-get-started-in-the-fediverse/
There’s more than just lemmy
I don’t think I’ve really seen any literature about web3 that wasn’t a crypto scam in a trench coat. Do you have any links or info about the original goals of web3?
Wikipedia agrees with you
Riiight… nothing to do with advertising. It was cryptobros, it’s always cryptobros.
Basically forums
Bring them back! I for one would rather use a forum over a fucking Discord server any day of the week. At least forums are open, searchable and discoverable. Good luck finding the answer to a question you have that some poor sod like you may have also asked in a Discord server months or years ago.
God I hate discord.
The thing is that many people, myself included assumed most were dead and cannibalised by Reddit and Facebook groups. Turns out those specialised places have been running continuously on their own pace. Yeah, threads can still span hundreds of pages but in the end going through them makes you an expert on things overnight ;)
Oh my God, the Something Awful forums are still up: https://forums.somethingawful.com/
I would sooner die than join the ranks of SA goons.
No it’s fine, we banned Lowtax
Too little, too late 🤷♂️
Maybe we’ll use newsgroups for actually talking to people again
Arr, those be the high seas now
Yes, but this time deep web forums that are unsearchable/unindexed so that information is lost forever! (Discord, telegram, matrix)actually that might actually be a return to web 1 forums before search engines were giant and all forum seach engines sucked ass 😂
Sounds a lot like the past. And, actually, a bit like the current internet. Custom websites, feed syndication, etc. didn’t disappear, they just shrank in the face of behemoth platforms.
“the future of the internet is likely its past…”
Check out Neocities, a great community of indie web fans, built in the spirit of the old GeoCities sites.
Some really great sites there, it really captures that late 90’s to early 2000’s internet vibes.
We should be able to bootstrap activityPub to GeoCities websites. WordPress integration is taking a long time.
That’s backwards, activitypub is higher level than websites. And you can literally make a website already and embed an activitypub stream
One might suggest that it should have always been that way.
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Your worldbuilding is in SciFi classics tier, but it’s missing all of the global South.
Australia is already more locked out, but its Internet can only exist in function of US.
I think the future of the internet is darknets for example Veilid.
The darknets are here, have been here, but are by definition: dark, so unless you’re in one they’re useless to you.
First rule of darknet membership: don’t talk about the darknet.
Unless something’s changed in the last few years, the darknet is too difficult for normies to use.
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Links like that feel like the time I first had access to the Internet. Kinda weird but very very interesting. Thank you.
Real issue is how much effort are people willing to put to maintain those communities.
I think by now we have figured out the majority of people are garbage and you only want to spend time with a select group. Discord seems to have this figured out.
The only thing which has changed is the medium.
astronaut holding gun meme.jpg
we’ve always been garbage.
I don’t think we have. Some people theorise that the tower of babel really happened. Whether you’re religous or not doesn’t really matter but it shows that during the earliest recorded days humanity wanted to help each other and everyone by building a tower. There are theories as to why god didn’t allow the tower to reach them so then the blame is put on god, not humanity.
Esperanto ftw.
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Discourse has some of the forums that use it on its website
It is for me, but I have my doubts that the majority will avoid the corporate-owned spaces.
They’re getting so shit people will have no choice. They’re already leaving one alienated group at a time
I think it’s always going to be a sort of long-tail phenomenon, with most people involved in the biggest platforms, but a large number of small platforms that attract a minority of the overall population.
