…smaller communities
So like it was before the dawn of Reddit and social media?
Sign me the fuck up. I miss my dumb little websites with a dodgy layout full of terribly cropped gifs.
But how will we find any of these small sites with the dogshit search is lately.
Webrings, index pages, pure chance
Sounds a lot like the past. And, actually, a bit like the current internet. Custom websites, feed syndication, etc. didn’t disappear, they just shrank in the face of behemoth platforms.
It is for me, but I have my doubts that the majority will avoid the corporate-owned spaces.
I think it’s always going to be a sort of long-tail phenomenon, with most people involved in the biggest platforms, but a large number of small platforms that attract a minority of the overall population.
Depends on where you live, but in the US I think there will be a sharp divide between two general groups: a minority who put some thought into what they do, and the vast meme-ified masses who accept whatever is laid out for them.
They’re getting so shit people will have no choice. They’re already leaving one alienated group at a time
The future of internet is you have to ask your government for permission before you can visit foreign websites.
There is no longer “Internet”
It will be suceeded by:
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Freedom Net (where “Antifa” is Banned, and you need a swastica armband to get access)
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Euronet (where UK just left, again)
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United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland(they noped out of the UK, and re-re-joined the EU) -
Putin’s #1 Digital Fan Club
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中华人民解放互联网 (People’s Liberated Internet)
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And that’s it, Canada and Mexico got Invaded by the US; while UK, EU, Russia, China all fought over the remaining of the world
(okay maybe my worldbuilding is ridiculous, but the world is collapsing and I want to write a story about my predictions of the future mm’kay? 😉)
I think the future of the internet is darknets for example Veilid.
The darknets are here, have been here, but are by definition: dark, so unless you’re in one they’re useless to you.
First rule of darknet membership: don’t talk about the darknet.
Unless something’s changed in the last few years, the darknet is too difficult for normies to use.
Your worldbuilding is in SciFi classics tier, but it’s missing all of the global South.
Australia is already more locked out, but its Internet can only exist in function of US.
You think the current US would stop at Canada and Mexico?
They wouldn’t.
EU would have to defend Greenland from the USA (and given the already huge amount of US miliary presense, they would probably fail). South America would be a warzone between US and resistance forces funded by EU, but since they also have to fund the defence against Russia, they don’t have the fund to fight two fronts, so they focus more on the EU-Russia front. UK will have to also defend itself from the US military that can launch an attack from Greenland at any moment (good luck, they left the EU lmfao). Russia and China relationship doesn’t do so well and they fight over Mongolia and the “Middle East” (for lack of a better term). Australia joins China as a Special Administrative region because USA gone fascist, and EU is already fighting two fronts, so they eventually got absorbed in China’s sphere of influence. Japan is now a warzone between Vanguardist “Socialist” China, and Fascist USA.
And Taiwan is… wait what’s a “Taiwan”? Oh that boring island that has totally always been under PLA control and totally never had any de facto autonomy under the name ROC, like ever, that Taiwan? Long live CCP! (/s 😉)
(Actually, maybe I should write a story about all this… 👀)
Panama, Greenland, after that might as well take the rest of Central America, move all the people out to the Galapagos Islands and build an all inclusive ocean to ocean resort complex.
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One might suggest that it should have always been that way.
I firmly believe that connecting people to their IRL friends is an important part of the potential of the Internet, as it is shown by Facebook, for example.
But I also believe there are people looking to connect with new people and finding a community where they can express themselves wholly. I think the current Internet is weak in this regard, weaker than it has been before, but I think it’s possible to build a place where people can connect.
Pretty much. I should be able tobmake friends with any human on earth with an internet connection. That this is still hard is something we need to fix
I have a friends Discord I set up a year before Covid, and for about a year only 3 people used it, mainly to play some games together.
But when Covid hit, it obviously gained some traction. And now it’s THE place I interact with friends since I’ve long ditched the likes of Facebook.
I keep going back and forth on whether or not to possibly set up a Mastodon server for friends. The hardest part would be convincing people to use it. But it could just be like our little shared space that could still interact with the wider world. It’d be kinda cool to have a Local feed be just people you know in real life.
A small friend group is best suited for chat programs (discord et al.) But if you want to expand the group a mastodon server is a good idea
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Check out Neocities, a great community of indie web fans, built in the spirit of the old GeoCities sites.
Some really great sites there, it really captures that late 90’s to early 2000’s internet vibes.
US servers though… better self-host or use another non-US VPS.
Definitely depends on the site because I’ve seen some impressive modern looking sites in the past, but a lot of sites I find on there definitely encapsulate that vibe in a great way.
“the future of the internet is likely its past…”
The future is the past!
Just like as it was in the past
You’ve found the leading light of destiny burning in the ashes of your memory.
Real issue is how much effort are people willing to put to maintain those communities.
Small communities where one can talk about specific subjects? Man there’s something like that already and people can run it from their own computers too, forgot the name though.
The good old days of phpmybb
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Discourse has some of the forums that use it on its website
The best I can think of off hand is to look at the mobile apps that are designed to interact with traditional forums, because they will have directories of all the ones that are integrated with them. For example, Tapatalk and Fora Communities. You should be able to find thousands of forums categorized in those apps? I’ve never used these apps myself, but have heard of them.
This is what Google used to be for.
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We should be able to bootstrap activityPub to GeoCities websites. WordPress integration is taking a long time.
That’s backwards, activitypub is higher level than websites. And you can literally make a website already and embed an activitypub stream
Thank fuck the corporate silo era is (slowly) coming to an end. And they tried so hard to turn it into TV 2.0.
Depends on how you measure things. If you pie-chart the internet by bandwidth used, most of it is currently used for TV 2.0 (streaming video, mostly by subscription.)
I really don’t consider streaming services to be the “real” internet. It’s video on demand, and not a communication, socialization and creation space like the rest of the net.
