Technology

...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.

So the past of the internet?

Basically forums

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.

It is for me, but I have my doubts that the majority will avoid the corporate-owned spaces.

The future of internet is you have to ask your government for permission before you can visit foreign websites.

There is no longer "Internet"

It will be suceeded by:

• Freedom Net (where "Antifa" is Banned, and you need a swastica armband to get access)

• Euronet (where UK just left, again)

• United Kingdom of Great Britain ~~and Northern Ireland~~ (they noped out of the UK, and re-re-joined the EU)

• Putin's #1 Digital Fan Club

• 中华人民解放互联网 (People's Liberated Internet)

• And that's it, Canada and Mexico got Invaded by the US; while UK, EU, Russia, China all fought over the remaining of the world

(okay maybe my worldbuilding is ridiculous, but the world is collapsing and I want to write a story about my predictions of the future mm'kay? 😉)

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.

One might suggest that it should have always been that way.

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.

"the future of the internet is likely its past..."

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.

Just like as it was in the past

The future is the past!

I wasn't too early, but I joined reddit around the Dota 2 beta, so circa 2012, and damn the site became more and more garbage the more people it had, most comments became nothing but karma farming one liners, references or snide shit.

Communities grew into massive echo chambers, quality of discussions went down the drain.

Real issue is how much effort are people willing to put to maintain those communities.

Small communities where one can talk about specific subjects? Man there's something like that already and people can run it from their own computers too, forgot the name though.

We should be able to bootstrap activityPub to GeoCities websites. WordPress integration is taking a long time.

Thank fuck the corporate silo era is (slowly) coming to an end. And they tried so hard to turn it into TV 2.0.

yes, but where could we find something like that?

I do not hold with this, at all. After leaving Twitter two years ago, and going to Mastodon, and Mbin, when the world started to come to an end three weeks ago, when Trump flipped to making the US and ally of Russia against the world, I needed to be plugged in, so with years of reservations against supporting anything fucking Jack was involved in (he's still the largest single shareholder of bluesky stock, so fuck off telling me he stepped away from the board), I finally signed up for Bluesky, because when shit is going down, I don't need to be browsing some lefty tankie currated community for realtime news, I need to be jacked in to the widest collective there is, so I can parse and disseminate information for every source possible.