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  • Everyone lamenting this needs to check out neocities, or even get into publishing your own website. Even if it's on a "big evil" service like GoDaddy or AWS, whatever. As long as it's easy for you. Or learn to self host a site. The internet infrastructure itself is the same, but now we have faster speeds, which means your personal sites can be bigger and less optimized (easier for novices and amateurs to create). People still run webrings, people still have affiliate buttons, there's other ways to find things than search engines, and there's other search engines than the big ones anyways.

    There are active communities out there that are keeping a lot of the old Internet alive, while also pushing it forward in new ways. A lot of neocities sites are very progressive. If you have an itch for discussion, then publish pages on your website in response to other people's writings, link them, sign their guestbook.

    Email still exists. I have a personal protonmail that I use only for actually writing back and forth to people, I don't sign up for services with it aside from fediverse ones. People do still run phpbb style forums, too. You'll find some if you poke around the small web enough.

    A lot of these things are not lost or dead. They just aren't the default Internet experience, they're hard to find by accident. But they are out there! And it's very inspiring and comforting.

    • Its not that there is a shortage of these spaces, its that they are not popular. I'm not sure they ever were popular amongst the general public though, to be fair. Personally I think its okay to have a somewhat small community.

      • Yes, I like it smaller! Ideally you have a sort of fractal structure of a bunch of smaller, tighter communities, which are also bound up in larger but looser communities. Then you can get the benefits of broad exposure and resource sharing from large communities, as well as the benefits of meaningful individual engagement and respectful kinship from smaller communities. I think that personal sites along with forums and the rest of the Internet really can do a great job of bringing this about.

        As with many things, the responsibility ultimately lies on the individual to protect themselves and resist falling into bad patterns. Most primarily, maintaining your small community takes effort, and it's much easier to just be a passive part of a very large community that subsists on infrequent uninvested involvement from many people. It's even easier to be part of a "community as a service" like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. where all the incentives behind community building responsibilities have been supplemented with real income or fame. But of course then the people making posts, suggesting ideas, steering trends, managing communities, etc. are all in it for reasons that are not necessarily aligned with the well-being of community members. Hence the platform becomes a facade of a healthy community. Really good community upkeep seems to need to be done out of a love for the community, and any income you collect is to support that, rather than the other way around. But love for a community is often not sufficient fuel to power someone to serve huge groups out of the goodness of their heart, when they don't even know 99% of the members. Not to mention that even if someone really is that altruistic and empathetic, the time and resources become unfeasible. So ultimately, a fractal model or an interleaved model seems to be the only one that could work.

        Don't get me wrong. Large communities are awesome in their own ways and have their own benefits. They have more challenges, though. Ultimately the best way to build a good large community is by building a good small community.

  • I think those old forums dedicated to discussions and interests are still there. The internet has been urbanized and now most people live in large cities, but some people still live in small towns in the countryside.

  • "The Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization..."

    <sigh>

    they were spot on.

  • I would argue was even more the case during the earliest days of the web. It was really a open, untamed, wild west feeling, like anything was possible.

    Then the corporatization of the internet happened during the dotcom bubble, and all hell broke loose, we know the rest.

  • It sucks because it’s beginning to feel like a life wasted. I got in early, my career pre-dates the 1st .com crash. My first browser was Mosaic, then shortly became Netscape with the big pulsating “N” animation.

    I LOVED the early internet. I loved the personal sites, webrings, IRC and newsgroups. I remember the first time I spoke with someone on the other side of the world (hello to my Canberra friend, it’s me, your midwestern buddy). I felt part of something that was new and exciting and fun.

    Then ads came and it’s just gone to shit ever since. To the point where I now hate being online, all my shit is selfhosted and I barely interact with anything besides lemmy and mastodon (they still feel like the actual internet).

    I used to be slightly disappointed my kids didn’t turn out as nerdy as me. Now I am just thrilled that I was able to be a cautionary tale for them.

  • Dead Internet Theory is becoming mainstream now. How long will it be until we get AI slop rants about how worthless human content is?

    • We won't know because it will be AI bots who will be arguing that human content is better than AI

      Most humans are too slow, ignorant, passive and apathetic to join in important discussions.

      • Most humans are too slow, ignorant, passive and apathetic to join in important discussions.

        Hey, that's not...ehh, whatever.

281 comments