[zahirbmirza]

How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past? This has been on my mind for a while. The layer of trash some companies have built over the internet has been ruinous.

[jjulius]

>How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past?

In order to actually have and maintain a healthy balance of life and technology, such compromises are required.

[joshuablais]

I theorize it is going back to the protocol layer. The "web" for most people is a bunch of social media frontends.

[NetOpWibby]

I think the current web is sick and will never get better.

I propose building a new stack, without ICANN and friends (Verisign is raising .com prices yet again). I'm planning to build it[1] at some point, just working on other foundational stuff at the moment.

Cozy corners, webrings, and Gemini/Gopher is where I see the spirit of the old web alive and well.

---

[1]: https://dap.sh

[anthk]

Yggdrasil works like that. No bitcoin, no bullshit, your own tunneled ipv6.

[NetOpWibby]

Yggdrasil is on my list of things to try! I need to delve into it more tbh.

[abraxas]

Yeah, it's quite sad where we landed. Circa 2004-2006 while the internet was mostly open and accessible I mentally grouped "the internet" into two buckets. There was the real web plus usenet plus email and then there was "facebook" with its weird garden wall and exclusive invites or some such shit. I didn't think of facebook as being "on the web" even though they used the http protocol. It was highly unusual then to have any web content behind a registration wall.

So hardly anyone considered facebook to be a part of "the web". It was its own weird duck. Twenty years later and most people only frequent this "weird" part of the internet - this limited ensemble of paid and unpaid walled gardens.

[bobanrocky]

Your statement of ‘hardly anyone considered facebook part of the web’ is incorrect. Facebook became popular a bit after the Web had become quite mainstream. The idea of signing up for online services was not foreign to most of these folks. Now, AOL/Compuserve and such were more considered as non web.

[hdgvhicv]

That applies to aol, msn, compuserve etc, not to Facebook which you only ever accessed via http from a browser.

[abraxas]

Yeah, those didn't count either. AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties. With AOL I'm quite sure nobody considered them to be a part of the web. Their pages didn't have URLs early on but AOL "keywords" instead. Compuserve also weren't using http I believe. It was some kind of commercial WAN that was pitched as a competitor to the internet, no?

[zabzonk]

> AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties

yes, they were, in the UK at least. speaking as a compuserve user.

[hdgvhicv]

Ids like 102615,1320, with pay per minute for compuserve and for the phone call

Personally I never used cix but one of the magazines (pc pro?) has columnists on it at least.

[bandrami]

Similarly Twitter; I signed up in I think 2007 and only used SMS for the next several years until they finally stopped it. Once I switched to the web/app version I was frankly appalled.

[aboardRat4]

>How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past?

We need to be on the offensive, not on the defensive. We need to pro-actively scrape walled gardens and re-publish them without fluff.

We need to consider .onion to be the default domain for our websites.

And we should also not be ashamed of using AI to achieve our goals.

We need to implement modern conveniences in our programs.

We need to be writing bridges between walled gardens and deltachat.

[prawn]

A movement where some sites are only accessible by a specific browser or class of browsers, much more simplified than now? Where a site could put an agreeable browser into a no-JS, lo-fi mode?

[9dev]

That is pretty much the definition of Gopher