this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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Asklemmy
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The internet.
The internet of the 90s was wild, creative, and not as accessible. We dreamed that as it grew and became more accessible, a utopia of information and creativity would flourish.
Instead we got a bland, corporate wasteland, and free soapboxes for every shithead out there.
Yup, most of the internet is now sadly an ad-infested monetized corporate hellhole, and as a bonus it's now rapidly being filled to the brim with AI slop, because it clearly wasn't bad enough just yet... :(
Is there a solution (other than being on Lemmy)?
There is a bit of a smolnet renaissance happening in niche tech and creative circles. Using IRC to socialize, reviving gopher protocol for blogs, creating lofi and pure HTML/CSS sites instead of using bloated JS frameworks. And of course, creating simple and/or federated services for media sharing.
Tell me if you'd like to know more. Additionally, my home instance is full of people with such interests.
I would like to know more.
Mind linking some communities?
I hope they reply (and that I remember to come back and check again so I can see it,) I'm very interested, too!
I've been thinking of starting a blog to help motivate me to do more writing. For a while I felt burnt out because I knew I'd have no hope in hell of being able to do a bunch of SEO stuff to enable people to actually see if anything I write, but I've concluded that people based networks are the only way something like this will work for me. After all, most of my favourite blogs or blog posts are ones I've heard of through word of mouth.
I've not heard of gopher protocol though, that sounds interesting
If you are interested in gopher you might also like gemini protocol.
To be honest i hate irc, im glad matrix is slowly replacing it
IRC will never be replaced. Matrix is just a more modern option.
Theres XMPP too, its nice
If you havenβt tried I2P, it gives me those old web vibes.
Ooh, I looked it up and it sounds interesting. I look forward to figuring it out and experiencing it for myself, thanks! :)
Webrings, decentralized networks and list of links proposed by a blogger you like. That's a good start I'd say.
Yep, theres a lot of old/new sites for that:
https://yesterweb.org/community/
https://www.notechmagazine.com/
https://goblin-heart.net/sadgrl/cyberspace/webrings
All kinds of stuff. https://melonking.net/melon
Most kinda look like the old geocities lol
Decentralized & federated networks: Lemmy, Mastodon, Nostr, Freenet, I2P, etc
Donate monthly to Wikipedia
Geminispace.
NNTP :(
Go back to gopher :)
All that chaos is still out there. Its just that its smaller and you have to not get stuck in the corporate bullshit.
Finding it is almost impossible though. I've tried and tried but the search engines don't show any of these cute little niche sites that are definitely out there.
I feel the bigger problem is that there just aren't as many of them.
Why host a webpage now when you can just set up a Facebook page for it?
I wish people would realize there are people from every generation who won't touch Facebook, IG and other meta things. When we finally got s new mayor who actually said our town with soon have a real website, I nearly wept with joy.
βarenβt as many of themβ
I do not believe that. There is more of everything now than there was Internet before. The web used to be tiny.
You are not going to find what you want by clicking on the βMozilla Cool Site of the Dayβ. But they are out there.
Not that I do not agree with the point the OP is making. The βcool siteβ story itself illustrates the overall story-arc of the Internet pretty well:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Site_of_the_Day
You know, you aren't wrong.
I've been noodling on an idea for a while:
What about a.. fediverse focused/ federated search engine?
Yet back in the "good" days, we didn't have search engines.
I disagree. There's so much more creativity and information out there than there was in the 90's.
Itβs just easier to access and in a prettier box, covered in advertisements.