[roenxi]

This reads to me like a rant. Good material for a blog post but I don't think there is anything particularly profound going on. The internet is not a static place, and parts are always being born and dying. Maybe today is going to be Google search.

There was an interesting question early on in the internet of whether content would be aggregated by corporate entities or whether people would self-host and communicate peer-to-peer. The question has been answered - corporate entities (points at the Y logo at the top of the page) do a much better job of curating spaces. This has implications that a lot of content will be lost sooner or later, but at least the big repositories like Wikipedia make copying data out easy.

I don't even think communities retreating to Discord is a bad thing. The public internet is too small; we can't all fit in it. Private spaces might be a big net win. It'd be a win if someone figured out how to force OSS to win at the protocol level so interoperability is easier; that is a major Achilles heel in the whole setup right now. But that problem has never really been solved (unless you're the sort of person who doesn't understand why IRC got marginalised).

[pjc50]

> I don't even think communities retreating to Discord is a bad thing. The public internet is too small; we can't all fit in it. Private spaces might be a big net win

Yeah, I think we should not underestimate the "dark forest" aspect of the 2020s Internet. It's assumed that discoverability is a good thing, and what so many pages are optimizing for - but it isn't always. People don't want to be exposed to political witch hunts (of any faction!) or DDoS.

HN exists in a liminal space where it's hostile enough to keep the turnover down, while being comfortable enough to sustain its social existence.

(Also, people say "our reach" while at the same time the Internet remains radically individualistic - if you want there to be an "us" there has to be some sort of solidarity and governance, the total free-for-all was never sustainable except on the very margins)

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> unless you're the sort of person who doesn't understand why IRC got marginalised

Or X Windows. I still hear the occasional diatribe, on how X is "just as good as" Windows or Mac (usually from a person that pretty much exclusively uses CLI). These folks can't understand why desktop Linux hasn't crushed the Microsoft/Apple hegemony.

People who hang in like-minded communities can often assume that "everyone" is just like they are; when, in point of fact, their community represents the tiniest sliver of an edge case.

There's a lot of tecchies, in the world.

But there are a lot more non-tecchies, and they are the ultimate arbiters of what succeeds or dies.

The Internet (actually, every type of infrastructure or social construct) will be shaped by this great mass of uneducated, non-technical, ADHD, etc. people.

The tech folks that make the huge piles of money, know this, and work to serve (and train) the masses.

[082349872349872]

GP> Private spaces might be a big net win.

I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet geek world; things like cons and zines were way more important than now, but they existed, and we definitely didn't expect for there to be, let alone rely on, mainstream channels providing our social contact.

> there are a lot more non-tecchies, and they are the ultimate arbiters of what succeeds or dies.

Succeeds, yes. Dies? I think no. There aren't many mechanisms to kill off things in the long tail, other than whatever the kids mean when they whinge about "discovery".

In The Time Machine, the Morlocks use the Eloi for sustenance. I suggest we do something similar, living among ourselves in our caverns, letting the masses frolic upon their platforms, and merely harvesting a few percent (2?) of the revenue every now and then; not so much as to threaten their existence, but enough for us to thrive.

> "We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society." — ♝

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Well, "dies" happens, when the Eloi don't use/buy something.

Morlocks like to be paid. If they don't get paid, they might not do it.

[082349872349872]

> ...when the Eloi don't use/buy something.

As Morlocks provide all the infra for the Eloi, we can certainly provision it also for ourselves. (how many days of HN could fit in an average TikTok video?)

  It['s Morlocks'] care in all the ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock.
  It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock.
  It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care to embark and entrain,
  Tally, transport, and deliver duly the [Eloi "members"] by land and main.

[nine_k]

The relative market share of X window system, NS Windows, and macOS has nothing at all to do with technical merits of either. MS Windows dominated the corporate world because of MS Office, corporate-level technical support, and efficient salespeople. MacOS became prominent because of the superior hardware produced by Apple.

While indeed uneducated (in specific tech; may otherwise be smart), non-technical, highly varied people who all have too little time constitute the bulk of any audience, big moneyed interests always have and will continue to shape this audience's perception, especially where there is a network effect. It's not just Chrome vs Firefox or X vs Mastodon; the same mechanics stand behind the likes of Coca-Cola.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

What are you talking about, X just works. I haven't had to go diving in and manually configure X in _years_ and I remember when you had to tell X to treat your mouse wheel as an extra button just to get it to work. And I say this as someone who uses exclusively nvidia GPUs.

The most I have to do is set the monitor layout and KDE/gnome work exactly like windows with a graphical UI.

I get it. You prefer wayland, as do many people. You can push wayland without making things up about X. Honestly, if X fixed the screen tearing issue I'm not sure there would be a strong reason to prefer wayland over it other than technical purity.

[TimeBearingDown]

The parent post never brought up Wayland, and it’s off-topic, but the security of having input only going to specific apps and not every X client is a massive win and one reason I’ve used sway since 2018.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I took it as a joke (I hope).

[injuly]

> This reads to me like a rant

It was. I agree with most of what you said.

> I don't even think communities retreating to Discord is a bad thing.

I don't dislike discord myself, but don't like the fact that most of it closed off. You don't get to see what's inside a server before creating an account and joining it.

[yetanother12345]

I don't know if you were around when the US internet was inside AOL? And the French inside Minitel?

All the rest of us didn't really care what you all did in there. Platforms and Walled Gardens alike come and go.

[devb]

> The question has been answered - corporate entities do a much better job of curating spaces.

Do you have a citation for this, or are you just asserting it as a fact?

[soygem]

Despite the new forum feature, Discord is very poorly searchable and requires to be in a specific guild to see what is going on

[troupo]

> The public internet is too small; we can't all fit in it.

what?

> It'd be a win if someone figured out how to force OSS to win at the protocol level so interoperability is easier

You know that HTTP, HTML etc. is open and interoperable? Or that there's no end of open protocols for interoperability?

Edit:

For the size of most of those communities you could host your own Discourse server on a NAS behind Cloudflare's tunnel, and the world would be better for it.

E.g. some opensource projects in the Elixir space have been moving to Elixir's ElixirForum: https://elixirforum.com/. And now you can search those discussions, link them, point people to them etc. The "small public internet" seems to accommodate it just fine

[foul]

>You know that HTTP, HTML etc. is open and interoperable?

W3 at its core is very simple. This simpleness gives large gaps of freedom in what two parties have to do for exchanging data, e.g. 27 years have passed between the birth of W3C and Webauthn.

>Or that there's no end of open protocols for interoperability?

There is a multitude of reasons why you have marvellous designs on websites but you can't name a mass-market search engine you can run outside of the browser on your local computer using on-line data. Sure there are some or you can nowadays assemble some software parts and build your own, but it isn't a thing, and there is a why.

[squigz]

What is the why?

[foul]

Data in W3 is designed as poorly as FTP, relies on third-party for consistence and transfer. And we used it a lot for bullshit content we thought we paid upfront (by buying hardware and access to a network).

W3 will always be the perfect medium for an ad publisher (given the role of publishers in a capitalist nation) who may or may not give away for free a platform for evaluation and a delivery network.