Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00’s every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we’re well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don’t know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don’t look forward to hearing news about it. It’s sad, man. We’ve lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We’re at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don’t think most of us will like what the next era brings.
Well. Those corporations took their money and threw it in. Basically fusions of different services. Besides that you have a lot of clickbaits and cheap stuff like dropshops and so on.
You gotta be very picky on what services you use. Lemmy f.e. is amazing for me. It does not feel like someone wants to get money off me.
The internet basically became what the analog world was before and it’s anything else than amazing.
Edit: in short terms: Capitalism took the internet from the people.
Edit: in short terms: Capitalism took the internet from the people.
Well said. The Internet was certainly a lot more fun before anyone figured out how to make money on it. But it’s insane that these companies make more money now than even the largest giants did when I was a kid, and it’s still not enough for them. I’m just flabbergasted by their insatiable desire. They could keep a good product and still pull insane profits, but they’re willing to burn it all down for another percentage point on their quarterly return. I guess that’s a change to the world in general now too. There used to be a common wisdom that if you built a great product, and made your customers happy, you’d be successful. The prevailing attitude now is that the success that comes from that isn’t enough anymore. You need to make the worst product that you’re still able to sell, and then make sure you sell it to the same people multiple times. It’s gross.
It’s the cancer that capitalism truly is. If you’re not growing, you’re failing and enshittification is an inevitable late stage consequence of capitalism.
It’s just pump and dump.
enshittification is an inevitable late stage consequence
Maybe, but I don’t think it is. Enshittification is a direct result of our tax policy that encourages cashing out, only looks at the short term, and requires constant growth.
There was a time when companies built a reputation and held onto it for a hundred years. We could go back to that.
Tax the rich.
Agreed. We need to revert to meaningful tax brackets and apply some new ones to prevent billionaires.
Yup. Wikipedia is a good example for an instance that solely exists to support people.
There are plenty sites of this. Take a look at some websites that are teaching you skills without asking for money and so on.
That’s how I remember the internet. Sharing knowledge. Of course bigger sites need to make ends meet somehow and that fine with me. But as you already said - more more more.
I’d say that the old Internet is still there. It’s just sharing space with the much bigger, much more mainstream, capitalist juggernaut now, with limited overlap.
Other than online shopping, my Internet use hasn’t changed all that much since 2008, other than having to add a bunch of anti-tracking stuff to my web browser.
Yeah. I just know that forums aren’t a thing any more. Old fashioned browser games are rare.
Otherwise a lot of valuable news sites became clickbait ad bloated monsters. Only a few are still good.
But yeah… it gets easily overshadowed
What they do is the essence of capitalism. More growth. More profits. Enough, or the same as last year, is not sufficient. It must be more, the numbers must go up. And any publicly traded company is legally bound to pursue gains for its shareholders, they actually cannot stop. What makes a corporation is the same thing that makes them hellbent on yet another fraction of a percentage in profits.
The whole system is utterly ridiculous and fundamentally incompatible with reality, once you actually think about these things. A system demanding infinite growth in a finite world.
You need to make the worst product that you’re still able to sell, and then make sure you sell it to the same people multiple times.
This is a lovely summary of modern capitalism. The carnival barkers would have you still believe that excellence rises to the top, but it doesn’t. What wins is the appearance of excellence, as a facade for the least effort possible, like you said.
Share markets created this perverse incentive that rewards businesses for appearing successful even if they produce fuck all. I’m thinking of Jack Welch era GE or today’s preeminent carbon credit trading firm, Tesla Motors.
It reminds me of the feedback loop engulfing the major LLMs as they consume more and more of their own content and start outputting lower and lower quality: the original goal of rewarding the best is long lost, replaced by making line go up at all costs.
The 90s were worse imo when it came to quarterly returns
Yeah, for all of Lemmy’s shortcomings, it’s the best thing to happen to my internet in the last year.
A decently thriving online community of thousands of active users, not run by an entity or corporate board intent on sucking every last cent from people? Hell yeah!
Funny I said the same thing in 1995.
The internet is what you make of it. Meaning, you don’t need the entire wide area network, you just need what you don’t want in your local area network.
In terms of an interconnected network, you need only what you need!
This is an amazing time. Lemmy, self hosting, docker, cloud hosting, $100 consumer devices that rival $10k servers from ten years ago, AI, LLM, global gaming, etc….
Yeah I’m with you. Just look at reddit. Enshitification has gone too far and it’s leading to decentralization. Here we are, after all.
I’m sure the streaming services are next. The nice thing about software tech is it is easy for folks to develop alternatives
100% + you can already see it on the fringes. The need for a server to stream content evaporates w/advancement in client-side compute. Why plex or jellyfin when you can do it all in the rendering layer?
Our interconnected network layers function because of open standards, with layers decoupling complexity up & down (sep of concerns) as well as left & right (standards that facilitate novel capabilities).
In 2004 I was a radical young man protesting for bikes and against the Iraq War. At one of the meetups another kid who had been at the RNC protest in New York showed us this software someone had hacked together overnight to broadcast SMS messages. Basically you could send an SMS to a VOIP phone number and it would echo the SMS to everyone subscribed. They were using it to communicate in the crowd at the protest and avoid police kettles. It was pretty cool but I admit I didn’t really see it as being more broadly useful.
Later that night the group went for drinks and I was talking with one of the older radicals and he was telling me that the internet was too good and too powerful and they were going to shut it down. I thought that was absurd. How could they get rid of the internet!? He said they would figure out a way to shut it down, there’s just no way they could leave it out there, it’s too dangerous for them to do so.
Now I look at the thing we call “the internet” in 2023 and it looks nothing like that internet. The current internet is completely corralled, controlled and monetized. He was totally right. While they never “flipped the switch” on it they used salami tactics little by little until there was nothing left.
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There didn’t even need to be a deliberate cartel for this to happen either.
Amazon realized it could make money and grow the company by offering cloud services and now AWS runs something like 30% of the internet.
Google turned their leading search algorithms into an extensive tracking and advertising platform that integrates with most of the internet.
Apple decided that people don’t need to be allowed to tinker with and repair their own devices so that hardware can be locked into a four-year cycle of planned obsolescence.
A whole bunch of profit-maximizing firms did the hard job of controlling everything for the governments.
I only really watch foss stuff, which should be exciting, but I get tired as it’s always much of the same news:
- a new private messenger (like we don’t have 500 of those already)
- a new app/program/distro that does the same thing as 10 other ones
- a “simple” app/program that doesn’t do much of anything, just like 10 other ones of the same kind, will get 3 updates and then die
- something for the terminal for terminal nerds that could really use a gui but shutup you dirty normie
- a library that sounds cool but nobody except maybe some corporation will ever use it
- announcement of a complete rewrite, which means we’ll never hear of the project again
So I’m not exactly thrilled about anything either, tho for every different reasons
announcement of a complete rewrite, which means we’ll never hear of the project again
A complete rewrite/redesign actually happens but with half of the original app’s features missing
Ugh, flashbacks to KDE 4…
and GNOME 3 too
Rewrites have failed so often that I wonder why people still think they make any sense.
It’s easy to look at source code and see that it’s got complicated. It’s harder to work out when it’s complicated because it needs to do something complicated like model something from the real world that’s complicated, or when it’s complicated because it’s accumulated loads of old crap. If you start experimenting with a rewrite, typically it’ll look like it mostly works before you’ve added most of the necessary complexity, and that can trick people into thinking that it wasn’t actually necessary.
Yeah, but what I meant more is that in almost every case, refactoring is the way to go.
I’ve been looking into continuing or updating old programs that don’t have maintainers in the FSF/GNU list, but the mailing lists and archaic webpages don’t help much.
I’m still learning, but I’m tired of not seeing enough good FOSS alternatives or only discontinued ones.
yes, it’s much needed now as many projects needs contributions and you can create a website and list all of the contributions that is required to make it a real foss alternative
The enshitification of all things is so frustrating. You witness perfectly useful technology being destroyed in the pursuit of like 5 dollars. I don’t answer the phone unless I’ve told someone to call me because it’s always a robot, my email inbox is full of garbage I didn’t ask for so I don’t check in much, now they’ve got robots texting me scams. I can’t even pay for petrol in peace, because they make a nickel having a tiny television try to sell me an energy drink. And nothing is done because heaven forefend that anything should come in the way of an extra .02% increase in some asshole’s quarterly report.
I was pumping gas a couple of weeks ago and that stupid TV came on and started playing ads at full blast. I stopped pumping, went inside, and pulled a Karen. I asked for the manager and then told him that I want someone to know that I’m never coming back to that station because it’s forcing ads on me when I’m already paying for a product. Then I left and will never go back. I know they don’t give a shit about one person, but if more people took these stands then we could stop having so much shit shoved down our throats.
I can’t in good conscience make a worker’s day worse because of something they don’t control, but I understand the sentiment. I agree though that collective action is probably our best shot at seeing change.
I wasn’t rude about it. I doubt it had any measurable impact on their day at all.
Yea, as long as you aren’t rude to the employee at all, you are good in my book.
If I was going to complain, I would start with something like, “Hey I know this isn’t your fault and you just work here, but can you tell your boss…” Not only will that let the employee know that it’s nothing personal, but the employee is more likely to bring it up to management.
In the meanwhile, EU legislation has gone from being so boring you would prefer to watch the grass grow to making headlines that make you smile.
Ironically, farmers, the people most interested and invested into watching grass grow, has benefited greatly from EU agriculture subsidiaries in the past.
What about the people who watch paint dry? Surely the EU has their back covered too.
Nah, that’s what the paint is for…
You can thank capitalism for this, back at the dawn of the internet it was largely just regular people running sites and building organic networks. Then the internet started getting commercialized, and the tech started turning increasingly user hostile and exploitative.
Corporations complain about how IOT was supposed to be the next big thing but it went bust. Meanwhile they are the ones who tried to use it intrude on everyones lives. Which is why no one wants it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
some goofball did a whole song about it
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
a classic
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+1 for FOSS, but it’s not easy to do. It’s sort of like going vegan. It’s great at first, but then you try to go out to eat and it’s hard, family gatherings become difficult and political, people start to push meat or question your motives. You still feel good about it because you’re doing it “for the animals” or whatever, but you’re no longer in the mainstream. While your coworkers all go out to that new steak joint, you’re left behind with your bag of broccoli.
To elaborate, look at Lemmy. You can get FOSS apps for your phone to browse Lemmy, but now try to coordinate some event, like your local soccer club using only FOSS. Plenty of folks are content to blindly consume what Zuck or Goog wants them to see and use.
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What is FOSS?
Free and Open-Source Software
Free Open Source Software.
Edit: there is also FLOSS which adds the French “Libre” to include “free as in speech”.
In case this wasn’t asked sarcastically - Free and Open Source Software.
Or in the case of leaked source Code it’s also Forced Open Source Software.
I’ve been using Linux for decades and I don’t use the big tech sites much. I get excited about a new release of Gnome or KDE or some cool command line utility…
Because you are right, the web is taken over and they want to turn it into cable TV subscriptions for sites and verified internet accounts etc.
The goals of the security agencies and the goals of the big tech ad agencies go hand in hand. None of them care about the users, and both of them just wants the user data, as much as possible.
I think using tech like Lemmy and Matrix gets us away from all of that shit, and it’s good enough these days for anyone to use without too much trouble.
The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
I read it as: ‘They embraced, extended and extinguished what you held dear’.
Exactly.
Welcome to capitalism
Now go home?
I totally agree with you here. Now it feels like bots (AI) making content for bots (crawlers) and the only thing we a getting programmed to use is Google, where your question is answered without the need to even visit the website it took the data from.
It’s just boring and I’m a website developer 🤷♂️
Google has been trying very hard, for a very long time, to be the only destination on the internet. They want all the traffic. They started with site summaries at the top of the search page, then they moved to AMP, where they’re in charge of serving the content that others create, now they even show Reddit chains on their home page, and who knows what they have planned next. By serving content that other people created they get to serve their ads and keep 100% of the revenue, rather than sharing a pittance with some small AdSense publisher. They announced to the world that their values had changed when they changed their motto from Don’t Be Evil, and they’re certainly ignoring it now.
Even before it changed its motto, the idea of a company saying “don’t do evil” is on the same level as a cat saying “don’t scratch furniture”.
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The death of this guy has to do with some of it, he worked on some pretty cool stuff and was an all-around pretty awesome dude working for the betterment of the world.
you mean the murder of this guy
miss him every day
The way I see it Steve Jobs marked a turning point with those Apple events. The corporate platitude bullshit with the “you told us and we listened” jargon. Before technology was mainly hobbyist nerds making stuff out of the love of technology. There was a two way relationship where the developers trusted the users and the users trusted the developers be acting in good faith. Now it’s lifeless and jaded beneath a veneer of forced corporate smiles. Over the years everyone adopted the turtleneck speak in one way or another.
It’s an insult to our intelligence to push anti-patterns. All while expecting us to engage like sheep in the mandatory capitalist pep rally. ‘We made 20% efficiency to your oppressive experience. Now cheer! I said CHEER damn it’.
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But my great man theory!! 😫
Eh… He was a great marketer, but he didn’t usher in our current tech dystopia. I blame social media.
I blame Google. When the same company owns the most popular search engine, most widely-used browser, most popular email service, one of the largest video sharing platforms, and the largest online advertiser, that’s called a monopoly.
Our current tech dystopia has many facets and factors that went into creating it.
Jobs’ quest to simplify computing (great), unfortunately came along with a maniacal god complex and demand for control that led to Apple creating a monopolistic vertically integrated walled garden that stifles innovation and avoids competition. It’s the model that Google has increasingly pursued and is a part of why tech innovation has stalled out these days.
That widely depends on what you are using it for. I think it’s amazing.
I can buy a computer for $500 with 8 cores, 32GB ram, 512GB NVME storage. I can install free open source linux distribution on it that manages virtual machines. It can run dozens of containerized free/open source applications on it.
Then, i can use my domain name and freely available services like letsencrypt and cloudflare to make it securely available on the internet.
Internet is what you make of it, always has been.
If you only rely to 3rd party websites then you’re missing out on a lot of usability.
I guess it depends on when you stared using it.
Today, a lot if people take a lot of things for granted.
I still remember the days of waiting for a website to load, making myself coffee while it’s loading.
Now i can stream realtime 4k video of my house on my phone, served by my computer.
I can game with friends conencted to my voice chat server that i own and has awesome voice quality and low latency.
I can have all my files available wherever i am, instantly.
I can forget my phone and my laptop, login to my server at a friend’s computer and do whatever i need to do.
All that wouldn’t be possible if the internet was stuck in the 90’s.
Bit of a silly question:
I got quite the overkill server‡ for free‡‡ a little while ago and I’ve been struggling to find stuff to do with it
What kind of stuff do you self host?
Basically all I’ve got currently is TrueNAS Scale running on mine and it feels like a bit of a waste just running that.
‡ My server is from 2012 but it’s got dual hexacore Xeons (can’t recall exact model), 192GB of RAM, and about 40 TB of storage in Raid-Z2. The storage came from my old crusty NAS, I didn’t get that for free.
‡‡ Well mostly free, I was told I could have it if I got it out of they’re garage which took about 2 days.
My server is from 2012 but it’s got dual hexacore Xeons
So it idles with a 250W power consumption?
Surprisingly no
It idles at about 150w
Here are a couple of ideas:
- Nextcloud to host your files and replace GDocs/Office
- Home Assistant to control your smart home
- Plex + Radarr/Sonarr to replace streaming sites
- RSS Feed Reader to read news and blogs (sorry can’t remember the name from my phone)
- Single user ActivityPub instances
- Host your own blog site
I’m sure there’s more
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I’m not hosting a lot, just things i wanted to have in order to replace having a pc with installed apps. I want stuff to be a available on a web browser.
Some of the things i host:
NGINX Proxy manager - pretty much required Joplin - notes, apps for all platforms available Wiki.js - to replace Joplin, i don’t like installed apps HomeAssistant - home automation Mealie - converted my family paper cookbook Paperless-ngx - documents organization Mumble - voice chat server for gaming and meetings NextCloud - pretty much self explanatory Jellyfin - i want to be able to play media that is stored on the NAS, family photos, videos MQTT - self explanatory ZigbeeToMQTT - connect zigbee devices to MQTT Grafana - pretty graphs WireGuard - VPN access Trillium - to replace joplin for actual note taking Homepage - to display and organize all services VS Code Server - self explanatory OctoPrint - printer management Whoogle - i don’t like ads and “algorithms”
My total TDP is 15 watts. Idle is about 5W. I can’t imagine what i would do with a higher power consuming machine, it wouldn’t be financially feasible.
The best (and simplest) thing I have running is AdGuard Home. It’s a DNS server you run that blocks ads on the entire network.
I also run a wireguard server on my router and clients on my laptops and phone.
With these combined when on the road on cell or Wi-Fi connections all my traffic goes right to my home internet and it’s like I’m home.
I have access to all internal services, devices, and I get no ads in apps and websites (where technically possible). Highly highly recommend. I couldn’t live without it.
I also have home assistant running but that is way more work than just installing a server. It’s almost a hobby in of itself.
Editing - I didn’t mention it but PiHole is an alternative to AdGuard Home. I didn’t mention PiHole to keep things simple but after years of using PiHole I’ve switched to AdGuard Home mostly because of the per client configs, ease of maintenance and UI. As always, check out both and choose what’s best for you.
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I don’t know what you’re on about.
https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/blob/master/LICENSE.txt
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