An interesting essay on the Internet by Terry Godier
The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
You have noticed that the internet is dying.Twitter changed hands, changed names, and changed shape, and the version of it you knew is gone. Reddit went public. Google search now returns generated answers stapled to half a dozen ads. Instagram is bots making content for bots.
Discord servers you joined in 2019 have gone quiet. The blogs you read in 2012 redirect to parked domains. The forums where you learned what you know got bought, gutted, redesigned, and left to rot.
This is real. You are not imagining it.
The places you spent your younger years are gone or unrecognizable, and the places you use now are visibly straining under a flood of machine-generated text nobody asked for. There is a low ambient grief about it, and a faint guilt, something like: "I should be doing something. I should be somewhere else. I want the old thing back."
I want to tell you a thing that I think is true, and that I think will make you feel better.
[Source]: The Boring Internet
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Damp_Cuttlefish on Friday May 29, @01:51PM
I used to be upset about platform rot, but these days not so much.
Above the veneer, the real world continues. Beneath it, the communities and technologies were there along.
I only have time these days for those quietly enduring communities, a preference common to many here I'd guess.
Now more than ever it feels peaceful to me, here in our distant mountain village. On a clear day we might see the cities, and perhaps in passing moments wonder what life must be like there.
Problems come as news from afar. Perhaps one morning smoke will rise on the horizon. How dreadful.
Not to worry though. They aren't interested in us.
And it seems an awfully long way away.
When the time comes, I hope we can welcome the displaced with kindness.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by namefags_are_jerks on Friday May 29, @02:11PM (1 child)
Missing from the list: telnet .. There honestly was a time when it was /magical/ to be using a system overseas as if it were nothing more special than one that was on-campus. Heaps of systems, and services, were open to quasi-anonymous access. RMS refused to use a password for the longest time and anyone could telnet into his account at MIT for a while. MUD and MUCK players know it well, too.
I got the instant warm fuzzies from finger being remembered. Once upon a time you could get the latest from John Romero (or was it Carmack?) by checking his .plan ... The protocol would also report "GECOS" information, where no-one was too worried about giving away their personal phone number if you needed to reach them when they were offline.
telnet, finger, plain http.. Of course all got 'deplatformed' by the know-it-all groupthink about how your PRIVACY would be the bitch-boy of the Internet. But.. then the situation wasn't about communication sensitive information through those protocols.
I do think it made light of the true situation with 'No One Owns It' -- Control is Ownership. National/Provider firewalls are a Thing, and they're on more than web censorship. DNS traffic needs to be on the whitelist here in AU, with the sophisticated user having to use hacks like DNS-over-HTTPS. On-site personal self-hosting is problematical, too, where I ended up running my hobby webserver as an Onion service.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Unixnut on Friday May 29, @03:45PM
Heh, your mention of telnet brought back a memory from god knows when. As it turned out I had the alias still buried in my crusty bashrc file. Turns out
is still up and running for anyone to access (in fact they have improved it for those of you lucky to be on IPv6).
Very true, it was naive in the early days of the internet to think that it would remain a global free unrestricted network. It was only so when the majority of people were not on it, and those that were were generally academically minded (and/or nerdy) so it felt like a large global university campus in some ways.
Then it grew, the masses started going online, the money-men showed up, and governments realised not only that they can tax it, but that their ability to control the narrative their population hears was slipping away from them, so slowly they tighten their grip on the internet. We shall see how much manages to slip through their fingers, but I don't expect the situation to be getting better anytime soon.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hopdevil on Friday May 29, @03:33PM
SoylentNews is still kicking, better than ever... oh, maybe he meant the green site?
(Score: 5, Funny) by looorg on Friday May 29, @04:02PM (11 children)
The Internet I grew up on isn't dead. It's just buried under layers of crap, filth and commercialization. I'm sure the services are down there somewhere. They are just not really used anymore. By anyone, or at least very few people and or possibly some bots.
I see you are new here. I was talking about the things that was online in the early to mid 90's. Not a few years or a decade ago. Get off my lawn!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday May 29, @04:19PM (10 children)
It has been a case of 'Eternal Septemberization [wikipedia.org]' of every service as it becomes 'popular', then cast away on the basis that nobody goes there any more because it is too busy [quoteinvestigator.com]. Also the 'Dead Internet Theory [wikipedia.org]'.
I was there in the 90s. And the 00s. And the 10s, and now the 20s, and it is fairly clear that there will be changes that are disliked by the 'old guard' made by people who want to be free to make their own mistakes. A problem with getting old is you get ignored by people who ought to know better, but don't.
There are sensible youngsters about; just not enough of them - so try to nurture them when you can.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Friday May 29, @05:08PM (8 children)
There will be, the problem is that most of the "advancements" over the last 20 years have been BS nonsense to more effectively grift investors. Web 2.0 where there was a focus on user generated content was bad enough, but Web 3.0 with the nonsense related to block chain re-invention of '70s era technology is worse.
The good news of sorts is that the best bits of the pre-00s Internet are still possible, and as long as you've got a public IP there's not a whole lot that can be done to stop people from reintroducing things like webrings and ISP hosted websites over trivial things. The thing that I worry the most about is slop, especially AI slop, burying that stuff so deep that it's practically inaccessible.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Friday May 29, @07:55PM (6 children)
I blame advertising on Usenet as being when the rot started. Then the idea of 'ad-supported' websites. That should really have been nipped in the bud, because it normalised the idea of people getting a 'service' for ostensibly 'nothing'.
There's an anecdotal story about a company owner saying that they knew half of their advertising budget was wasted - the problem being that they did not know which half. The illusory attractiveness of web-analytics is that the people paying for advertising think they measure how effective it is, and tweak all sort of 'targetting' parameters. The 'serious' Internet still avoids advertising, not always successfully.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Saturday May 30, @01:11AM (5 children)
I refuse to go anywhere on the internet without a very strong adblocker.
Advertising funded media is actually a big problem politically. If newspapers are dependent upon advertisers for their existence, you're not going to see articles that the companies purchasing ads disapprove of. This tactic is straight out of the Powell memo.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday May 30, @04:11AM (3 children)
I finally got around to setting up pihole with unbound and the internet is a lot faster generally. This site is a bit of an exception for obvious reasons, but I forget sometimes just how much of the bloat and the slowness is used to allow time to get more bids in before the page loads. Between the ads being flat out completely blocked from even being here to be blocked and the cached DNS information, things are a lot faster.
Ads tend to destroy pretty much everything they come in contact with.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Saturday May 30, @05:57AM (1 child)
I wish more people held this view.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday May 30, @04:41PM
Pretty much. Advertising is incredibly hard to do in a way that doesn't cause a bunch of problems and unless everybody advertising manages it, you get this sort of nonsense. Marketing and sales though aren't inherently damaging, it's just that in many places we've normalized the idea that it's a bunch of lying and fraud. But, the best marketing and sales will always be fundamentally honest, even if things do get some degree of puffing up or focus on the benefits.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday May 30, @06:40PM
On my smartphone, I tried these ad-blocking DNSes such as AdGuard. The main problem with those is all these public WiFi hotspots that will not work if you don't use their DNS. When it does work, it's great.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Saturday May 30, @08:54AM
Yes, I run both uBlock Origin and uMatrix. Advertising on the Internet is pretty much dead to me.
Dead-tree newspapers were (are) pretty much all 'ad-dependent', with a couple of exceptions where they were supported by someone using them as their personal propaganda distribution, or to promulgate a group ideology (Publications like the Racing Post [wikipedia.org], Socialist Worker [wikipedia.org], or Christian Science Monitor [wikipedia.org]) - they probably all still have advertising to defray costs.
The London Times famously has its front page dedicated to small ads until 3rd May 1966.
I find print advertising less intrusive than online, but got irritated when the ratio of advertising to content exceeded 1:1. I feel similarly about TV advertising, where I prefer programme segments to be no less than 12 minutes and advertising to be no more than 3 minutes, with a stronger preference for fewer ad-breaks and longer programme segments.
I wouldn't mind static images on web-pages so much: but animation, video, audio, pop-ups, interstitials and all the other intrusive methods irritate me highly.
(Score: 3, Informative) by sgleysti on Saturday May 30, @01:05AM
I really like what neocities and nekoweb are doing.
https://neocities.org/ [neocities.org]
https://nekoweb.org/ [nekoweb.org]
Of course, one could register a domain and set up a server or buy cheap hosting, but these lower the barrier to entry. I have fond memories of setting up a little website and hosting it on an old linux computer through my parents' cable modem using dynamic DNS in the early/mid 2000s.
Things like github are a newish development that's pretty cool. Although we had sourceforge before that. Wikipedia is neat.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday May 30, @09:28AM
Part of the problem here is that sensible old people are a rare breed too, and even the sensible ones slip up and give bad or incorrect advice sometimes, so the young just find it quicker most of the time to ignore all of them.
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by WILLIAM B PECKHAM on Friday May 29, @04:14PM (4 children)
All of those things are still there, you just stopped using them.
I still use telnet to access BBS systems, which ALSO never totally went away.
And, if you did not know, there are still ARCHIE and VERONICA sites if you want non-html access to documentation.
You just stopped checking.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday May 29, @05:37PM
You want veronica-2
https://gopherproxy.meulie.net/gopher.floodgap.com/1/v2 [meulie.net]
Most people in my generation called it gopherspace and veronica was not really a thing for most of the time it was around IIRC.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Friday May 29, @05:40PM (1 child)
If you want an obscure service, I used to use FTPmail from simtel20 "back in the UUCP days" like late 80s or early 90s.
Its exactly what it sounds like send an email to something at simtel20 asking for a file and it mailed the uuencoded file back to you. Here's a word thats a blast from the past : plesiosyncronous Not really real time not really batch. I got replies from ftpmail as a batch job that ran several times a day.
IIRC "large files" took multiple emails and you used unzip's floppy oriented multiple file thing. Or did they come back as tar files? Its only been like 40 years since I was doing that.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday May 29, @08:11PM
Heh. I remember concatenating uuencoded postings in the correct order to allow converting them to the original binary file.
It was a way of getting stuff though an 'email filter' - a zipped file would be stopped, but if I uuencoded, then removed the header - "begin 0644 filename.zip", the body would go through, and I could trivially manually add the header at the far end. Never done for nefarious purposes, of course.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30, @09:02AM
What I found weird was some bunch bought Friendster AND then deleted almost everything: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/friendster-deleting-all-data-do-we-still-care/ [cbsnews.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendster [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Funny) by krishnoid on Friday May 29, @07:16PM (1 child)
Won't someone think of the advertisers?
(Score: 5, Funny) by sgleysti on Saturday May 30, @01:16AM
I do, but it would be impolite to say precisely what I think of them.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday May 29, @07:39PM (7 children)
That's what the "new internet" is to me: plain text wrapped in fancy Javascript to make the piece exceptionally painful to read.
(Score: 5, Informative) by AnonTechie on Friday May 29, @08:13PM (1 child)
There is a plain text version: https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet/ascii [terrygodier.com]
This may be easier to read !
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30, @12:50AM
Oh thank God, but I scrolled down here too late, after scrolling through the whole damned thing because the prose was actually compelling enough to make me do that. The irony.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Friday May 29, @10:35PM
I do think about them.
But what I think about them is not fit to print!
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Common Joe on Saturday May 30, @04:51AM (3 children)
I'm going to disagree with the article and most of the comments on here. However, your comment and the Eternal September comment graze upon what I've come to say.
The technology to support a functioning Internet is still there, but it is useless if we can't discover one another. There is no good place for that anymore. We need things like the ancient Facebook or ancient Google where we can discover people and discover ideas. Where is that today?
The article says "The reason your mee-maw and your bank and your boss can all reach you at the same email address is that the protocol that made it possible was published more than forty years ago, and the people who published it did not successfully capture it inside of one company." Great. Except how do I find it under the mountain of spam? And how often do we change email addresses? People used to keep their phone numbers for decades. How often do people rotate their phone numbers these days? I think they're keeping them longer because of two factor authentication, but what about people who move to different countries? (Like me.)
The article also mentions finger. I haven't used finger in over 30 years and that was on an old, outdated VMS mainframe. I opened up a terminal on my Linux computer just now and typed in finger. It wasn't installed by default. No wonder because no one uses it anymore. I think the last time it was really a thing was before html took over. Good luck using finger on a cell phone. I won't because I won't remember his or anyone else's finger address.
Domain Name Servers are filtered. The great Firewall of China. Age verification on operating systems in the US. Server based apps instead of locally based apps. Websites that force me into specific languages based on your location instead of the language I want to read in. (I'm looking at you Google and Microsoft.)
I have trouble sharing a photo a family member sent me on WhatsApp to my friend on Telegram. Sure, I'm technical enough that I can work around that but it's not worth the effort. And don't even try to explain this stuff to my mother in law... or her grand kid who doesn't know how to use a mouse.
The list goes on and on.
What we need: Easy ways to discover people and discover ideas.
I'm glad this guy is trying, but... ugh. In my opinion, his suggestions are horrible. We need a modern solution with old-timey philosophy.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday May 30, @09:10AM (2 children)
Federated social media services exist, is that what you are looking for?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Saturday May 30, @02:56PM
Is there one that allows me to find people in my neighborhood with similar interests as me so we can plan a physical meetup? How will my tech illiterate mother-in-law do with this technology? Can I just sign up with one of them or do I have to play a "find 'em all" game, sign up on dozens of them so I can maybe locate an old friend I used to hang out with in childhood? Will it help me find a location where they sell something other than the same-company-produced bread sold in every supermarket around me? Is there a locally-owned restaurant nearby instead of one of the big boys? Does it have continuous random-scrolling or can I go back and find the piece of information I spotted a couple of months ago?
I mean, we used to have the white pages and yellow pages which could help with some of these questions. Today's technology (and data collection) should make short work of the questions I asked.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday May 31, @12:57PM
Federated Mastodon was a singularly frustrating experience. I knew what I was looking for, yet could not reach it. Found myself completely isolated from anything of interest (tho I could see a hostile community in which I had no interest). Never went back.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30, @12:03PM
This guy is really trying to make the argument that protocols are all the internet was. I argue it was the people and communities that made it up which have long been atomized, killed and shoved onto those same platforms at the expense of everything that came before it.
It's akin to saying: your town isn't dying. there are still streets and traffic lights. you can still get utility hookups. sure, there's not businesses, the clubs are gone, the parks have been turned into empty stripmalls but those were just a thin "commercial" veneer on top of what really matters; the sewers!