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by platevoltage 15 days ago
I have to admit, I'm kind of looking forward to what comes after the inevitable death of the www.
3 comments

Why?

The WWW was at least created with egalitarian ideals, even if it failed to meet those ideals (despite succeeding far more than people want to credit.) It was available to everyone, it ostensibly allowed anyone to publish and communicate freely. It wasn't intended for only a single culture or subculture.

Whatever comes after will either be entirely controlled by corporate and government interests or gatekept against "normies," and thus be a homogeneous cultural bubble doomed to wither into self-referential senescence and die, and will be far less free, less powerful and less capable than the web. We'll never get anything with the transformative potential of the web again.

A world where your only options are GovNet or EliteWhiteHackerDudeSpace. I don't look forward to that at all.

I would rather go back to when the web was useful, and everything wasn't either paywalled or plastered with ads too. The web will never die, but this version of it is on borrowed time.
I don't think WWW will ever die but I can see a hard split coming eventually. Most people will just put up with the current state of the internet for a long time yet.
Gopher and Usenet died
IRC lives, discord be damned!
I2P already exists and is usable.
But is it resistant to enshittification?
It has about the same problems with finding content that the www has, its just in the earlier stages
This has nothing to do with enshittification.
Yes, because it does not depend on a single entity, for-profit or not.
Neither does the normal web. It became this way. The ability to run decentralized is not what is preventing enshittification.

I would argue eg. a LoRa based Reticulum network is enshittification resistant, because of physical bandwidth and range limitations. It enforces decentralization and abuse/advertisement/... inherently doesn't scale, is not worth the effort. It favors authentic, low reach human2human information sharing.

The internet itself is not enshittified. Certain websites and services on it are. Ever heard of HN?
So, then why exactly do we need an alternative?