The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with.
Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill.
It is not utopia. It is full of spam, abandoned servers, broken clients, hostile nodes, strange old commands, half-maintained software, and people arguing in plain text about things no normal person should care about.
The interesting thing is the fediverse and the tildeverse are extensions of that older internet.
Tildeverse?
Tildeverse.org its a group of servers that are community run that are like shell accounts like you would have back in the day. They are modern OSs but you have an account and you share time on that system like you did with a mainframe.
They have IRC, websites, .plan files for updates via finger, mailing and news servers.
Just did a quick dive on it. It looks, and this is just from a quick search, to be similar to fediverse but likely older than our instances here, and has a basing from old school public access Unix systems. Kinda neat might dive deeper to get better understanding.
Yeah its a great community over there.
I always knew these as Pubnixes which I think is just an older word for Tildeverse
I wonder what that is too. Perhaps that’s ‘today I learned’ but I’m not sure on that.
I just really enjoyed this essay and wanted to share it. Cheers, nerds.
thank you. reading this article/discovering his other work genuinely might be the best thing I’ve seen all year
This was a great read. Thank you.
I was thinking about this today. The reason why everything sucks is partly enshittification, but also everything has been gamified. “Get this stupid award for liking…?” Why? I just want to mingle, chud.
I am on the same side of the issue as this author and I should be reading this and agreeing. But I disagree with nearly every statement, god this is such a bad essay. I think it does a terrible job of making its case.
The cherry on top for me is the author making a fucking RSS reader… I swear people in this space do not understand why its dying. They keep doing the same things over and over again instead of trying to actually fill the gaps. The solutions back then were solutions for the time, we can take them and improve them.
To be fair, it’s an interesting approach at RSS reader. It’s not like the rest.
It dynamically ranges the flow of content based on the source type and urgency. Breaking news are on top, but only for a few hours. Long reads stay for longer. After a while, old content disappears as to not overwhelm the user. It also applies different settings to news outlets and personal pages. So, this is one of the most advanced takes on RSS I’ve ever seen.
But alas, only available for iOS.
Good read, good share. Thanks uniflashmob
its hella annoying to read this paragraph pop up shite. tried ironfox reading mode but also failed.
there is some irony in writing about the old internet in an overstylised unreadable format.
Ok, that’s the first thing I bookmarked. Whatever that bookmarks functionality is.
