[echelon]

This totally misses the point several ways.

It's not software. It's the fact that distribution is owned and taxed by outsized players that live as gods and control the experience for the rest of us.

You might not care about Google and Meta, but your customers and parents will be bound up by them. You'll have to pay a tax to reach them. You'll have to jump through their arbitrary rules and give up more than you wanted.

They're the ones deciding to let privacy encroaching governments continue to erode our rights. It better facilitates their profit making opportunities and helps maintain their high walled moats.

Your little blog might have meant something in 2004, but today it's nothing against the titans.

The internet of 1990-2008 was not "indie". It was "free".

The internet of 2000 was the undiscovered country. The internet of 2026 is 1985 surveillance coupled with Brave New World meets Thunderdome algorithms.

The other reason the author misses - the internet was a much smaller place. A personal website or forum would be seen by a large percentage of the internet. The "indie" web was the web. (Drop the "indie".) Now you have to go live on a platform and be an ephemeral engagement sink.

If you don't obey all the arbitrary rules (no external hyperlinks, no videos under thirty seconds, no website references in your images, no green texts, no edits, no posts after 11AM), you won't be selected by the algo lottery for content farming to the horde. Nevermind that they'll ban you if you're a problem to any important powers.

You're just a consumer now. And if you're a creative person, your wares are content to be algorithmically milked.

Isn't that just a little bit dystopian? Doesn't it fall just a tad shy of the dreams we had twenty years ago?

[robotnik]

> The other reason the author misses - the internet was a much smaller place. A personal website or forum would be seen by a large percentage of the internet. The "indie" web was the web. (Drop the "indie".) Now you have to go live on a platform and be an ephemeral engagement sink.

Some of this might just be demographic shifts, i.e. "normal" people using the internet more. The people who are on the internet now would likely never have been interested in reading some indie blog, they just weren't online in 2000.

I could be wrong, but I suspect the absolute number of people who read this blog today is larger than it would have been in 2000, just in a smaller corner of the internet.

[nly]

It feels like the youngest generation are more enthralled by the big media/tech regime online than we were 20 years ago though

Sure we used AIM and MSN Messenger but we also used IRC, visited forums and looked at newsgroups.

So many people these days don't even own laptops. Their entire digital footprint comes through apps on restrictive mobile platforms.

[tacker2000]

Lots of early internet users were also “gate-kept” in some weird AOL CD land.

Also, you dont need to consume the algo content. You can choose to disengage.

[jillesvangurp]

> You're just a consumer now. And if you're a creative person, your wares are content to be algorithmically milked.

That's a choice.

You don't actually have to be an innocent passive bystander; that's a choice. A lot of these nostalgic threads read like old men shouting at clouds at this point "Get off my lawn!". I'm part of the generation that built the internet (though I didn't build any of it). It wasn't taken from us; we just got old. That's actually on us. Nobody ever stopped anyone from blogging, publishing RSS feeds, or whatever it is people did when they and the internet were young. I was there as well. The only thing that changed is that we sunk in a collective mid life crisis when Google Reader pulled the plug. Alternatives never filled the vacuum. Social networks took over and then imploded. And boohoo the evil corporations took our toys. Give me a break!

If you choose to get your news from algorithmic ad factories, that's a choice. Sure, it's convenient. I do this as well. But actually we're empowered to do whatever we want. More so than ever. There are plenty of tools and content creators out there. And with AI it's trivial to build your own tools. Try it, it's fun. The only limitation is your imagination and apathy.

I've been working on a Google reader style reading experience but running locally with codex. It uses locally running LLMs, embeddings, and entity extraction to stay on top of the fire hose of news. Embeddings enable semantic search, clustering, related articles. Entities identify common topics. LLMs allow me to turn this into a personal news agent and editor. Grand vision and I'm a bit geeking out. But completely doable with all the modern toys we have available. Use openclaw/codex/claude cowork/whatever agentic thing you want, make it parse opml and sync and store feeds. Add some skills and you have yourself an AI news agent. Or skip all of that AI nonsense and do it by hand. RSS readers never were rocket science. This stuff no longer is hard.